About "high crimes and misdemeanors"
Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2019, 04:08 PM - Edit history (1)
Does this mean "felonies and misdemeanors" or "high crimes" and "high misdemeanors?"
I'm assuming the answer depends on an understanding of these terms back when the constitution was written.
Edit: The Harvard professor at today's Judicial Committee hearing ansered this directly. High applies to both crimes and misdemeanors. And high misdemeanors are a special category discussed at the Constitutional Convention. I'm wondering if they tend to correspond to "criminal" and "civil" in today's language. I guess I gotta keep listening. Although Fozzledick in response 9 probably has answered it correctly.
tia
las
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On the other hand, I like textual exegesis. And it's not so much a matter of terms (which have been argued about in the legal literature but haven't had all their nooks and crannies adjudicated ,so their "real" meaning per the courts is still moderately fuzzy) as of grammar.
While the grammar has changed somewhat (looking at the 2nd amendment, we can see that the status of the nominative absolute has changed ... with this sentence being an example of one of the two things it's been reduced to), grammar tends to change less than lexicon. Typically grammatical change happens slower and is more seen in the frequency with which grammatical "tools" are used than in the tools available. Adjective scope hasn't changed. Some would start thinking long and hard about punctuation, but that was highly idiosyncratic and you wind up with probabalistic interpretations with huge error bars.
Presumably we're not going to have two kinds of major corruption (treason, now defined rather nicely by legislation; bribery, ditto, whatever the politically self-serving anti-textualist position may be on the part of some) and a third less well-defined kind of serious corruption ("high crimes"
suddenly followed by a general, ambiguous catch-all category that includes stealing an apple from a sidewalk vendor or making a risque joke ("misdemeanor" .
That would be silly. "Yes, you can be removed for listed serious offenses, but just in case we don't like the cut of your jib, mister, we can remove you for *anything*, bwa-ha-ha." A serious person would not write such text if he wanted the Constitution to be working document and not just an excuse for politicians to help themselves by removing foes in their quest for power. They knew Roman history and how that went.
Let the scope of "high" extend over the entirety of the conjoined noun phrase "crimes and misdemeanors". Anything else can only be driven by picayune and transitory motivations.
