NYT "The Impeachment Process is Barely Functioning"
Hyperpartisan politics and an implacable president may break Congress’s ability to check him.
By Elizabeth Drew
Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/opinion/impeachment-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
When the process of impeachment drove President Richard Nixon from office in 1974, there was widespread celebration that “the system worked.” But the 1974 impeachment process may turn out to have been unique, a model for how it should work that has yet to be replicated — and perhaps never will be.
The current proceedings have demonstrated how fragile the Constitution’s impeachment clause is. The idea of the clause was to hold a president accountable for misdeeds between elections; but it’s now clearer than ever that it doesn’t work very well in the context of a very partisan political atmosphere.
That’s because the founders didn’t anticipate political parties, or “factions,” much less the power they would gain. James Madison pointed out in Federalist No. 51 that men aren’t angels, and so there needed to be a check on a president’s power — in addition to the voters’ decision every four years. In 1974, the constitutional system held while a president tried to assert, unsuccessfully, that he wasn’t accountable to Congress or the courts. But now the impeachment process is barely functioning, and it’s not difficult to envision it breaking down completely.
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According to members of the Judiciary Committee, a number of committee Democrats wanted a more expansive set of articles. Some wanted to add an article taking Mr. Trump to task for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Some argued for a far more expansive indictment of Mr. Trump for abuse of power. A few wanted articles to reflect the president’s alleged violations of campaign finance laws by concealing hush money payments to two women with whom he’d had sexual relations after his marriage to Melania. (Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is in prison for abetting those payments.) And several Democrats wanted to add some of the evidence gathered by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Mr. Trump might have obstructed justice by trying to shut down Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
But Ms. Pelosi and her close ally, Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and a fellow Californian, didn’t want to re-raise the matter of Russia’s role in the 2016 election. They argued that they should stick with matters on which the facts were clear and that pertained to national security.
This left the more liberal Judiciary Committee members — the majority — less than happy. One committee Democrat had told me that if the liberals didn’t win additional charges, they could bring them up later. But barring something extraordinary happening, it seems highly unlikely that the Democrats would undergo another impeachment exercise in 2020.
I asked Mr. Schiff during the Judiciary Committee’s deliberations about the concern of many Democrats that by limiting the articles of impeachment to Ukraine, the Democrats were by implication saying that other Trump misdeeds were acceptable.
“I think that that’s very much a legitimate concern,” he replied. “The president has engaged in other misconduct, but I felt that the most egregious misconduct was in pressuring an ally.” The charges in the two articles was “the case that we can prove today.”
He added that work on other matters relating to Mr. Trump’s ethical conduct “will continue.” The last thing he wants to happen, he said, is to allow Mr. Trump to invite foreign intervention in another election.
What, then, are we learning about Congress’s ability to check a wayward president? One can conclude that in our highly polarized world, a strong-willed president like Mr. Trump can limit impeachment — and possibly wreck it.
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What checks, then, remain? The unwieldy 25th Amendment, which essentially relies on the vice president to initiate the process of removal, is no real alternative, unless a president is near comatose.
That means that unless our political system undergoes a radical change, we could be on the brink of having no check on the president, no matter how radically he defies the Constitution.
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