Be bipartisan: Impeach Bush
By John Nichols
What decided this election more than any other factor, was the angry realization by a great many Americans that their president has lied to them about matters of war and peace, approved the warrantless wiretapping of their telephone conversations, and displayed a disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law unprecedented in the history of the American experiment. In other words, Democrats owe their electoral resurrection to a serious case of voters’ remorse with regard to President Bush. Because of this, House Democrats have an obligation to the American people to check and balance the executive branch. The best way to do that is to get serious about impeachment. Indeed, if they don’t, Democrats will suffer for disregarding not just their oaths of office, but also the will of the voters who entrusted them with the power to right the Republic. On this, the historical record is very clear: Holding the president to account is good for the country and good politics.
The history of impeachment is so rarely told that most Americans—and most members of Congress—see it as political kryptonite. In fact, impeachment has been an honorable, frequently employed tool from the nation’s earliest years, when it was enshrined in the Constitution as the essential corrective to executive excess. The genius of impeachment is that it can restore a proper balance of powers even when the procedure isn’t seen through to completion. This is as the Founders intended. It was well understood in the Republic’s early days that the point of impeachment was to prevent the presidency from degenerating into the “elected despotism” that Thomas Jefferson dreaded. If a president could be a “king for four years,” they reasoned, then he could easily abuse his powers to make himself a king for longer, or worse, launch the wars of whim that James Madison saw as the “true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”
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The notion that impeachment is “bad politics” for an opposition party simply isn’t grounded in reality. Of the nine instances when impeachment resolutions were filed against presidents, the opposition party secured the presidency in the next election seven times—most recently when Bush succeeded Clinton. After members of an opposition party pressed for impeachment in Congress, that party has almost always maintained or improved its position in the House at the next general election. After conservative Republicans proposed Truman’s impeachment in the fall of 1952, their party took control of both the House and the presidency. Democrats who moved to impeach Nixon in the summer of 1974 dramatically increased their presence in the House that fall. Even after Republicans bungled their impeachment of Clinton, their party retained control of the House—losing just five seats in the 1998 election that preceded the impeachment vote, and just two in the 2000 election that followed it. And, of course, they also captured the White House.
However, Democratic strategists have rewritten the history of the Clinton debacle to argue that impeachment is an electoral suicide pact. This notion that an opposition party must pull its punches rather than aggressively oppose a lawless presidency is the biggest mistake in politics.
In fact, impeachment is almost always smart politics for an opposition party, particularly one that is struggling to define itself. This is precisely because the initiative is so risky. Things have to be done right; impeachment cannot be a mere partisan game. The opposition party must persuade not merely its own members, but some members of the president’s party, as well as a majority of Americans, that a commander in chief has so fundamentally betrayed his office that his removal must be contemplated. By marshalling convincing arguments to this end, an opposition party (and sometimes the reforming wing of an offending president’s party) asserts itself as something more than a sports team competing for a title. When an entire political party speaks wisely of the weighty responsibility of impeachment, as Democrats did in 1974 but Republicans never fully did in 1998, frustrated voters see it afresh. A previously listless and disengaged political force begins to appear as an appropriate guardian of the nation’s values.
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