Has Donald Trump Committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors?
Last edited Sun May 5, 2019, 10:57 PM - Edit history (1)
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a noted constitutional scholar—and member of the House Judiciary Committee—discusses the question.
By John Nichols
'With the release of the redacted report from special counsel Robert Mueller, the House Judiciary Committee is wrestling with questions about how to address evidence that a sitting president has engaged in abuses of power. Some of the issues are similar to those that led the committee to approve articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon in 1974. Others are unique to Donald Trump. To get a sense of how the committee might address Trump’s wrongdoing, and what upcoming hearings may reveal, I spoke with committee member Jamie Raskin. Before his 2016 election as a Democratic representative from Maryland, Raskin was a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law and one of the nation’s most distinguished commentators on constitutional questions. Here is some of what he said about how the committee and the American people should approach one of the most awesome of those questions.
john nichols: How should we be thinking about impeachment?
jamie raskin: It’s the people’s and the Congress’s final instrument of self-defense against a president who is trampling the rule of law and assuming the powers of a king. It has both legal and political dimensions. The legal aspect requires us to ask whether there have been high crimes and misdemeanors such as treason or bribery, which I take to mean grave offenses from on high of a public character against the democracy itself. The political part requires us to ask whether the public interest demands impeachment and conviction as a remedy to stop a pattern of misconduct that is contemptuous of the rule of law and our Constitution. If it were a purely legal judgment, it would have been assigned to the courts in Article III, but the founders rejected that idea and located it in Article I, with Congress.
From the beginning of the administration, I’ve said impeachment should not be a fetish for anybody, but it should be a taboo for nobody. At this point in events, we have to be taking it very seriously.
What people sometimes miss is that impeachment takes the question of holding presidents to account out of the paradigm of crime and punishment. The president is not punished by virtue of impeachment as he would be with a prosecution. He doesn’t go to jail. He may face prosecution separately, but this is about defending our Constitution by removing a president who has become an intolerable threat to the people and our form of government.
There can be real risks attendant to impeachment, as when it acts like a partisan hit over low crimes and misdemeanors, which is what happened with Bill Clinton. But there are real risks attendant to not impeaching when a president is systematically thwarting the rule of law and destroying constitutional norms. If you read David Stewart’s book about Andrew Johnson, I think you will come away with the sense that Johnson was an egregious threat to the Constitution, to the rule of law, and to Reconstruction, and he absolutely should have been impeached, convicted, and removed. Johnson’s escape from this fate by a single vote in the Senate was a tragedy for America and especially African Americans. . .
I felt at the beginning, and I feel now, that we need every tool in the constitutional tool kit on the table, and that includes the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, which we keep hearing about from people who leave the Trump administration.
The 25th Amendment, which was adopted in 1967, provides that the vice president and a majority of the cabinet can take action if the president is determined to be unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. But it also says that the vice president and a majority of a separate body appointed by Congress can act under these circumstances too. It’s just that Congress has never set up the body.
JN: You’d like to see that happen.
JR: It should have been done long ago. It’s necessary for every presidential administration, not just this one. There are lots of reasons that the president might be incapacitated, as the authors of the 25th Amendment, [Indiana Senator] Birch Bayh and [New York Senator] Robert Kennedy, observed. There are physical reasons, mental and cognitive reasons. These are serious things in the nuclear age, as the framers of the 25th understood.
So the 25th Amendment is not irrelevant to discussions about presidential accountability. The amendment itself is organized around separation-of-powers principles. You can go back and find dialogue among the senators [who authored] the 25th Amendment discussing the importance of having Congress engaged with the process as well as the cabinet. Congress is central to it. We have 535 Members of Congress, but just one president.'>>>
https://www.thenation.com/article/impeachment-trump-congress-mueller-barr/
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