I am getting really cross about the comments surrounding the question of whether it\u2019s Constitutional to impeach a former President.\r\n
Not the comments from the Other Party, which are mostly nonsense\u2014I expect that. The ones that have been getting up my nose are the ones mocking the idea that the House and Senate can\u2019t impeach and convict a former President. Lines such as Trevor Noah\u2019s \u201cIf you get fired at Best Buy, they don\u2019t just let you steal a TV on the way out\u201d, or Stephen Colbert\u2019s \u201cThat\u2019s like acquitting Jeffrey Dahmer because he\u2019s full.\u201d I\u2019ve seen a bunch of similar joke-like things from my friends as well.\r\n
But here\u2019s the thing: Our Previous President can (and should) be prosecuted for any crimes he committed while in office. Whether the Senate convicts him is irrelevant to that. In fact, it\u2019s sort of extra<\/i>-irrelevant, since there\u2019s an argument that the sitting President can\u2019t be prosecuted while in office. If that\u2019s true, then the only way to prosecute a sitting<\/i> President who has committed a crime is to impeach and remove him, and if his Party won\u2019t do that, then justice is at best delayed, and quite likely denied. But if a sitting President commits a crime two weeks before he leaves office, then prosecution is barely delayed at all!\r\n
Here\u2019s my point: we should not think of impeachment and removal as a punishment. Impeachment (and removal\u2014from here on out I will talk about them together and call them \u2018impeachment\u2019 if that\u2019s all right) is a safeguard. It\u2019s the only way to remove a dangerous President without violence. It\u2019s a terrible, terrible thing for our country to get to the point of having to impeach a President, but sometimes it would be worse to let the person stay in office, so there it is.\r\n
What, then, is the purpose of impeaching a former President?\r\n
First of all, it\u2019s not unconstitutional or anything\u2014the Constitution clearly leaves it up to the House and Senate to decide what the rules of impeachment should be, so if they want to impeach Franklin Pearce and bar him from holding future office, they can go ahead and do that. It\u2019s up to them, and it\u2019s a political decision, meaning that they will live with the political consequences of whatever they decide, not a judicial or fact-finding one.\r\n
But why do it? There are (I think) two reasons to impeach a former President who is no longer in power and no longer an immediate danger. First is in order to bar that person from holding office again, and that\u2019s legitimate (and in this case, I think, important and worth doing). Normally, of course, if the former President\u2019s own Party rejects him even mildly, there would be no question of future political office, but in this case, given a variety of circumstances, the Party should make it official. If, of course, they want to dissociate themselves from his actions\u2014if they don\u2019t, then they should at least consider nominating him again in 2024, right? Ugh.\r\n
The second reason is to draw a line and say: this is behavior that should get a person impeached\u2014any future President would know it, and any future Congress would know it. I think that\u2019s worth doing in this instance as well, although less on the incitement-to-riot front and more on the harassing-state-election-officials front. On the other hand, any President who had the nerve to try to use the power of the office to rig the election isn\u2019t going to be stopped by a previous President having been caught and impeached. Richard Nixon\u2019s removal certainly wasn\u2019t a deterrent over the past few years, and it\u2019s at the very least hard to say with confidence that a post-election impeachment would deter some future autocrat in the White House. And, of course, it\u2019s too late already: impeaching the President for inciting a riot would just clarify that using the weight of the Presidency to push foreign governments to dig up dirt on the political opposition is on the safe side of the impeachment line.\r\n
Do I sound ambivalent? I\u2019m not really. Given where we are now, and given the inability to go back and fix anything in the past, impeachment was the correct move, and the Senate should vote to convict. But doing so will not fix<\/i> anything, not in practical terms, and (absent criminal prosecution) it will not be punishment for any criminal activity, much less justice.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger has Cranky Thoughts.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20381,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379\/revisions\/20381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}