Penny Thoughts: Impeachment Consequences

We Americans have been inundated with news which has saturated the media as regards the political effort to remove Our President from office using the impeachment process.  That process is provided for in Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution of the United States and stipulates, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

I, for one, still do not know or understand exactly what the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” means or the fashion in which it is defined.  Sadly, it does not appear that this phrase has ever been defined.  Perhaps the authors of the Constitution wanted just such a phrase as a nebulous “catch-all” in case they really wanted to rid the Nation of an undesirable “President, Vice President [or] civil Officers”.  It certainly is a convenient phrase for today’s House Majority which is blindly stampeding for some kind of offense to use for removing Our President.

There have been six Presidents in U.S. history who have been either impeached or were subject to the impeachment process.  The list is here below.

            John Tyler – 1843 – Impeachment not passed by the Senate

            James Buchanan – 1860 – Committee found nothing had been done

            Andrew Johnson – 1868 – Impeachment not passed by Senate

            Richard Nixon – 1974 – Resigned from office before Senate vote

            Bill Clinton – 1998 – Impeached not removed by Senate

            George W. Bush – 2008 – Committee took no action on Resolution

The impeachment of President John Tyler came the closest for me in terms of trying to define “high crimes and misdemeanors.”   Tyler was kicked out of his Whig party because he had vetoed a number of bills the Whigs had wanted to pass.  He so enraged the Whigs that Virginia Representative John Minor Botts declared that Tyler was guilty of the “high crime and misdemeanor of endeavoring to excite a disorganizing and revolutionary spirit in the country.”

Wow!  That sounds eerily familiar to some of the things Speaker Pelosi is implying about Our President.  In fact, when researching the impeachment of Tyler, one will find some striking similarities to what Our President is suffering presently – and that took place 176 years ago.  It was George Santayana who declared that, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  And it clearly applies here – but, then no one ever accused a desperate politician of learning from anything.

Unfortunately, those who are shouting “impeachment” do not really care about the long-term consequences of that paralyzing process.  History has shown us that so long as a House of Representatives is engaged in impeachment pursuits, no real governing takes place – no significant bills, no fiscal responsibility, no budgeting, and no general oversight.  For all intents and purposes, it can be called “legislative decay”.  And do not believe for one moment that the Democrat Representative from the Left Coast (California), Adam Schiff, who also is the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, cares one iota about governing!

Before we jump headlong into the morass of the impeachment process, with all of its debilitating results, it seems prudent to take measure of the general state of the Nation during it. 

Let me be clear, in researching information for this column,  I have found some consistent consequences which have resulted during an impeachment process: 1) the only significant part of the population which cares about the impeachment is the part charging full bore into the process; 2) the legislative focus becomes minimized and in many instances is ignored; 3) there is no significant promotion of the impeachment until the media gets involved and takes sides; 4) try as they might, the claim by those who are saturated with impeachment that it has to do with a “constitutional” issue or issues, in every instance of Presidential Impeachment in America the issue has been and always will be political; and, 5) the ultimate consequence is the resultant anger then apathy of the population that the political class is intrinsically immersed in their “game” of who is to blame and their campaign pledges to “serve” ring hollow and empty.

In the final analysis, an impeachment of a President weakens the Nation in that it alienates the population.  The process itself creates a schism which expands into a wider chasm between the population and those who have been elected to serve the citizenry. 

It prompts Americans to refer to their government as some confusing and confounding entity we see as a removed “thing” which serves itself and the bureaucracies it has birthed.

And, in my view, that is just not how America was ever meant to be!