[Dallas News]
Impeachment chatter is suddenly in vogue. It was strictly déclassé during the Obama years. To hear congressional Republicans tell it, the Clinton fiasco of the late Nineties proved both that the Constitution’s procedure for removing corrupt presidents is futile and that invoking it guarantees political carnage for the accusers.Today’s Democrats, as the saying goes, never got the memo. Or perhaps they have known all along that their counterparts learned precisely the wrong lessons from President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Now that the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump is a realistic contingency, though, getting those lessons right is vital.
The problem with Clinton’s impeachment was not the impeachment process itself. It is difficult by design, as it must be for stability’s sake. But it is hardly obsolete. It did, after all, drive a president from office ‐ Richard M. Nixon, who resigned on the cusp of impeachment ‐ just 25 years before articles of impeachment were filed against Clinton.
No, the problems were twofold. First was the nature of the impeachable offenses. It is not the case, as is commonly assumed, that they were salacious, but that they were remote from the core duties of the presidency. Second was the mulish insistence on pursuing impeachment when the public was clearly opposed to it. An impeachment effort cannot succeed without the tireless building of a political case in favor of removal, a case that achieves a critical mass of public support before impeachment is sought.
But the Dims - and the media - have been tirelessly building their case for the last two years.
Hindsight is always 20/20, of course. I was still a Justice Department prosecutor during most of Bill Clinton's second term as president, not a journalist doing public commentary. But I favored his impeachment, just as most Republicans and conservatives did. It is easy to see now that the episode has had an enduring, poisonous effect on our politics.
When the Framers debated the Constitution, among their principal concerns were the awesome powers of the new executive office they were creating in Article II, that of the president of the United States. It would be "indispensable," James Madison opined, to vest the power to remove the chief executive in Congress, which was conceived as the dominant, Article I branch, most accountable to the sovereign ‐ the people.
What percentage of the midterms electees were new to national politics, I wonder?
Some delegates believed the ballot box would be an adequate check. The consensus, however, was that an impeachment power was essential, and not merely for such obvious corruption as treason and bribery. The Framers adopted a term of art from British law, "high crimes and misdemeanors," to address truly egregious instances of maladministration.
Oh, go read the whole thing. The National Review article has fewer impediments than the Dallas News site. NR article from 12/20/18 Wanna skip down to the conclusion? Here ya go -
The Republicans' post-Clinton assumption that impeachment efforts are politically ruinous is wrong. After 1998, Republicans continued to win elections until 2006. Rather, the Clinton impeachment teaches that the public has a healthy resistance to impeachment but will abide a failed impeachment sought in good faith. It further instructs that the Constitution's high impeachment hurdles cannot be surmounted without an indefatigable political campaign urging the president's ouster. To be credible, that campaign must be based on clear misconduct that implicates core presidential duties and imperils our constitutional order. To seek impeachment in the absence of such gross maladministration, or to seek it in the teeth of public opposition, is to guarantee failure.