A thing I noticed recently\u2014During the administrations of the last four (at least) Presidents from the Other Party, I have said that impeachment proceedings should be started.\r\n
This one, well, obviously.\r\n
In May 2006, I said on this Tohu Bohu that an impeachment investigation into the warrantless wiretapping would be appropriate.\r\n
I am pretty sure I thought that that Presidents\u2019 father should have been impeached on the grounds of\u2014I don\u2019t remember which grounds, but I was twenty-two years old, and I was sorely outraged. I didn\u2019t have a blog at that point, thank goodness. Probably complicity in Reagan\u2019s October Surprise, or perhaps Iran\/Contra, or maybe the invasion of Kuwait and the associated violation of the War Powers Act.\r\n
And I thought that the fellow who was President from 1980-1988 should have been removed for the Iran\/Contra business, and possibly on medical grounds as well\u2014I don\u2019t think I actually knew how unfit he had become in the last year or two, though.\r\n
The previous President from that Party left office when I was seven years old, and I don\u2019t recall thinking he needed to be impeached before that time, although I might have. I think I remember, at the time, thinking that it was obvious that the pardon was a quid-pro-quo, but since I\u2019m sure I didn\u2019t use that term in 1976 I am probably not remembering my own contemporary reaction.\r\n
The one before that actually did have to resign.\r\n
Now some of that youthful righteousness\u2014I no longer really agree with my younger self about either Bush. At least, I don\u2019t think that the world would now be better had they been actually impeached by the House, whether they were convicted by the Senate or not. Neither was the sort of immediate danger to the country that Richard Nixon was, or that Our Only Present President is.\r\n
I also think that Jimmy Carter was a bad President, and while I don\u2019t particularly think the evidence that Bill Clinton attempted to obstruct justice by suborning or intimidating potential witnesses is overwhelming, I am now appalled by how lightly I took his appalling mistreatment of women both before and during his Presidency. I don\u2019t support impeachment for that (at least at the present time) but it definitely affects my sense of his time in office. Barack Obama is the only good President of my lifetime, I think. But I certainly didn\u2019t support impeachment during any of their actual terms.\r\n
The obvious conclusion, then, is that I am a strong Partisan whose views on impeachment are determined entirely by Partisan rancor. And, I mean, I am a strong Partisan. I do think that my attitude toward a President or any politician are affected by the company they keep. I\u2019m sure that strikes deeper than I understand, in many cases. I\u2019m sure I am much more ready to believe in dangerous malice coming from the other Party, and sloppy peccadillos from mine.\r\n
But at least some of it, I really think, is that the Presidents and Presidential nominees of the Other Party for the last fifty years have been appalling, terrible, destructive politicians. And people. And as far as I can tell, no Presidents (of either Party) have been so dangerous to the rule of law as Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. I\u2019m pretty sure that all the Presidents have chafed against the restrictions put on them by our system, but all except those two have accepted, however grudgingly, that the rest of the government (the Courts and the Congress, but also the bureaucracy and the agencies and the humans working there, as well as the press and the party structure) shares legitimacy and authority with them.\r\n