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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPresidents Can Be Impeached Because Benjamin Franklin Thought It Was Better Than Assassination
Older article concerned mostly with Bill Clinton, but still worth reading about what the founding fathers thought of impeachment.
It would be best, Franklin argued, to provide the Constitution for the regular punishment of the Executive when his misconduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal when he should be justly accused.
The founders also debated on the criteria for impeachment, settling on treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors against the state. High crimes and misdemeanors was another term that originated in British law, Chafetz writes. Ultimately, he writes, impeachment on these grounds was better for the country than than assassination. The Constitutions impeachment procedures make the removal of the chief magistrate less violent, less disruptive, and less error-prone than assassination.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/american-presidents-can-be-impeached-because-benjamin-franklin-thought-it-was-better-assassination-180961500/
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,276 posts)PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)marylandblue
(12,344 posts)He said it was to North Korea when it was really going to India. Impeach!
Major Nikon
(36,814 posts)elleng
(130,130 posts)DONE!
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)Today we think of assassination as a horrible alternative. Really it is no alternative we would consider. But in 1776, apparently, assassination seemed to be acceptable. At least there were instances when it was deemed appropriate if no other means of deposition were available. Think of all the French aristocracy who died when the French emulated our rebellion against the British Crown. We kept up relations, even applauded them (for awhile anyway).
It is, indeed, funny to think of "obnoxiousness" as being a flaw to be dealt with through assassination, yet there you have it from the mouth of Benjamin Franklin.
poboy2
(2,078 posts)BigmanPigman
(51,430 posts)It seems that at the time executions were a fairly common way for leaders to be punished while assassination seems to be done by an unknown assailant acting on his own or with a very small group.
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)The point was to give people a codified way to remove a President from office.
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)In the absence of legal proceedings, there is only assassination. Franklin must have been thinking about British rule when he chose that particular phrasing. And it should be obvious that he was trying to compare the new system of the US (democratic and legal) to that of the British (tyranny and illegal). I think it was his way of saying, "Our way is better". I don't know how much of the discussion on assassination was truly tongue in cheek, though.
marylandblue
(12,344 posts)If there is no legal way to remove a President, then any attempt at execution would by definition be an assassination. At least Franklin may have thought that way about the execution of Charles I, which was legally questionable.
cos dem
(895 posts)If you define the chief executive as being "unable to be tried" in the conventional sense, then without impeachment, there is no conviction.
You could go back to Cromwell and Charles I to think about whether ad-hoc trials of the executive are a good thing or a bad thing. In this case, of course, one could say Charles was executed, because he was tried and convicted. But was the trial itself legal?
In our case, I'm not sure exactly what the best way to handle this is, but I do think there should be a mechanism by which some entity (Congress? voters?) can determine that the executive should stand trial for conventional lawbreaking (meaning conventional jury trial), in addition to the existing impeachment process.
sl8
(13,584 posts)I think "justly accused" should be "unjustly accused".
Scanned image of Elliot's Debates, Volume 5, pg 341:
https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=lled&fileName=005/lled005.db&recNum=362&itemLink=?%230050363&linkText=1
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)A week on DU would set him straight, I guarantee.
I think you ought to make a post of that passage. While the whole page is interesting, that passage in particular stands out to me as an example of how the founding fathers could never have imagined our current situation.
sl8
(13,584 posts)sl8
(13,584 posts)From http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/articles/impeachment-and-assassination/
Minnesota Law Review
Impeachment and Assassination
By Josh Chafetz. Full text here.
In 1998, the conservative provocateur Ann Coulter made waves when she wrote that President Clinton should be either impeached or assassinated. Coulter was roundlyand rightlycondemned for suggesting that the murder of the president might be justified, but her conceptual linking of presidential impeachment and assassination was not entirely unfounded. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin had made the same linkage over two hundred years earlier, when he noted at the Constitutional Convention that, historically, the removal of obnoxious chief executives had been accomplished by assassination. Franklin suggested that a proceduralized mechanism for removalimpeachmentwould be preferable.
The Article for the first time takes Franklins comments seriously, viewing impeachment as closely tied to assassination. The Article first unpacks Franklins statement by analyzing what were, for Franklin and his contemporaries, two paradigm cases of just killings of chief magistrates: those of Julius Caesar and Charles I. From these cases, it draws an understanding of the substantive law of presidential impeachmentor, put differently, it argues that we ought to understand impeachable offenses as (what might otherwise be) assassinable offenses. The Constitutions innovation in executive removal lay in pairing this older substantive law with new procedures meant to domesticate it and to mitigate the drawbacks associated with political murder.
The Article then traces the interaction of these substantive and procedural features at two key moments for the American presidency: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln followed closely by the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The Article then concludes by briefly discussing the impeachability of Richard Nixon.
Article PDF:
http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Chafetz_MLR.pdf