Sarah Vowell/The New York Times
If the president is impeached, what if, just as an experiment, the electorate gives acting like judges a whirl? But I mean the old-fashioned kind, without keggers with Squee.
Twenty years ago this week, the House of Representatives forwarded articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton to the Senate. Whether or not that was constitutionally warranted — it wasn’t — does any citizen on either side who witnessed or participated in that partisan dust-up honestly look back on it as an exemplary exercise showcasing Americans’ shared reverence for the rule of law? I’m thinking specifically of how the House Judiciary Committee member Howard Coble, Republican of North Carolina, mentioned that his office got a call from someone who hoped he would die “a painful death from prostate cancer.”
Given that President Trump, a Republican (or thereabouts), is at the center or periphery of numerous federal investigations, including inquiries with whiffs of high crimes like conspiring with a hostile foreign power and accepting emoluments, and given that the incoming House of Representatives, the body constitutionally charged with presidential indictment, will be majority Democrat, a 2019 impeachment is not unthinkable.
That said, conviction, leading to removal, requires a nearly impossible two-thirds majority vote in the Senate. Which did not stop me from wasting three hours pondering the logistical, moral and civil rights implications of handing over a job with 18-hour work days to Vice President Mike Pence, who reportedly refuses to dine alone with any woman who is not his wife. I had some policy quibbles with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, but I never once doubted their ability to share a sandwich while discussing the Triangle of Death. So the consequences of impeachment are almost as unpredictable as the crap shoot that is election.
Now, in the cold and quiet of late December, is the time to do homework, to bone up on impeachment’s legal intricacies and precedents so as to face the months ahead with a mutual resolve to be, if not gracious — gracious was never the point of the House of Representatives — then prepared.
In his book published last year, “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” Cass R. Sunstein notes that before an impeached president is tried in the Senate, senators swear a new impartiality oath distinct from their oath of office. “Senators,” he writes, “are supposed to act like judges, not politicians.”
Over the course of my lifetime — I was born in the Nixon administration’s first year — we all became part-time politicians. I don’t know what I used to put in the part of my brain that’s now crammed with the latest polling data — probably lyrics to songs by the Shangri-Las. (Though recent polls about Republican Party demographics might best be summarized by a girl group shrieking: “Look out! Look out! Look out!”)
Should the president be impeached for the third time in our history, what if, just as an experiment, the entire electorate gives acting like judges a whirl? And by that I mean the boring, old-fashioned kind, without any keggers with Squee.
Considering that the only executive branch event more unnerving for voters than impeachment is assassination, Mr. Sunstein’s book, among the recent harvest of titles for general readers, is a surprisingly cheerful read. A law professor who once clerked for Thurgood Marshall, the guy simply loves the law. In his handy, unpretentious chapter about mechanics and history titled, “What Every American Should Know,” he offers advice on what the citizenry should fear — both “extreme partisanship” resulting in “unjustified, harmful, and destabilizing efforts to impeach the president” and “the failure to use the impeachment mechanism in circumstances in which it really is justified.”
Mr. Sunstein deems impeachment “a kind of unused key that might unlock the whole republic.” Inspired by his family’s move to a farmhouse in Concord, Mass., built by the Minuteman Ephraim Wood, who stored patriot munitions there, Mr. Sunstein points out that it’s impossible to understand impeachment “without seeing its origins in the Revolution itself.” An expression of the founders’ renunciation of monarchy, presidential impeachment is about equality, an answer to George Mason’s question, “Shall any man be above justice?”