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“There are times when liberty alone can replace the love of personal comfort with higher and more active enthusiasms, can provide ambition and loftier aims than the acquisition of wealth and can shed enough light to lead people both to see and to judge the vices and virtues of men.” - L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Alexis De Tocqueville
We do not live in such times, but in hyper-, extra-, and post-constitutional times. The most recent example, the House today formalizing the impeachment process of Joe Biden. Impeachment is a foundational constitutional exercise. Article II, Section 4 states,
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
So, the House move is constitutional, yet in the constitution's 234 year history, it is only the sixth time the House has initiated presidential impeachment proceedings. After the constitution’s adoption, it took eight decades for the first impeachment, another 110 years for the second, though Mistah Nixon would resign, slithering back to Orange County before an official House impeachment vote. It would have been only the second presidential impeachment in the republic’s first two centuries. In contrast, today's Biden vote marks the fourth presidential impeachment effort undertaken in the last quarter-century. Three of the last five presidents have now faced impeachment, with the Democrats impeaching Trump twice. For the vast majority of US history, impeachment once an extremely rare constitutional act, now is de rigueur.
Fundamentally, impeachment is a political act. The first impeachment of Andrew Johnson was directly tied to the turmoil following the Civil War in regards to the victorious North's Reconstruction policies of the defeated South, most especially concerning the future of the just manumitted slaves, issues still tragically reverberating today.
Nixon's self-aborted impeachment also occurred against the backdrop of war, specifically Vietnam, but as the executive’s various Crimes and Misdemeanors were revealed, attention grew on the permanent unconstitutional war footing the US established with the institution of the National Security State. The abuses of power afforded the executive by this extra-constitutional concentration of power, both in foreign affairs and domestically, were nakedly uncovered for all to see. Unfortunately, with his resignation and pardon, Nixon's crimes are remembered, if at all, as a cover-up of petty crimes committed seeking reelection.
At the end of 1973, in a still well worth reading piece in the Sunday Washington Post Opinion Section, William Greider warned against the tack DC was taking in the Nixon impeachment,
“What the public has to understand is that if it asks Congress to impeach and try Mr. Nixon, it is really asking for much more than that. Impeachment on these offenses implicitly requires Democrats and Republicans alike to rethink a lot of recent history, a great many examples of excessive governmental power, and to render judgment not just on Mr. Nixon, but on the political past.”
It was not the president alone needing judgement, but the DC system itself.
“That could produce a new and higher standard. It could distill a more cautious definition of presidential power, of the meaning of 'national security'... Congress must tacitly acknowledge that electronic spying, excessive presidential secrecy and power, abuses of special interest dealing―that all these are maladies of this era, not just of this President.”
A scapegoating of Nixon would do little to correct these systemic maladies, most especially those directly tied to the National Security State and the “abuses of special interest dealing.” If these problems weren't addressed, “in the ways of Washington, the past slides easily into precedent.” With Nixon's resignation, his crimes and more importantly DC's systemic transgressions disappeared with little further probing, none held accountable. No longer crimes, they became precedent, simply how things are done.
The third presidential impeachment effort was an outlier, a rather ridiculous, deviant theater of the absurd to match the character of a pathetically corrupt president and a national politics careening ever faster downward. Mr. Bill's impeachment for blowjobs in the Oval Office was a putrid stain left not just on a dress, but the republic's history, representing descent into a scorched earth, unscrupulous politics, facilitated by a broken system.
In ways, the third and fourth impeachments were as ridiculous as the one they followed, a debauched fun house mirror inversion of Greider's systemic indictment. It was not the abuses of the executive, but those of the Congress teaming up with an ever more powerful National Security State, both combining with the concerted efforts of a derelict media establishment to spew massive amounts of disinformation. In the end, Russiagate proved nothing more than a Rodham-Clinton campaign opposition smear tactic continued after the rotund, orange haired, reality-TV star's election. The impeachments revealed the ever greater political rot, now less acknowledged and even sooner forgotten than the Nixon Era crimes. Like the Johnson and Nixon impeachment efforts, Trump's occurred against the backdrop of war. In this case, the aftermath of the National Security State's tragic Post-Cold War Russia policies in response to the Soviet Union’s self-dismantling. As with Reconstruction this failure still reverberates across not just the American, but also the global political landscape.
The effort to impeach Joe Biden is directly tied to the unaccountable power of the presidency, a completely off the rails National Security State, and in the now quaint words of Greider from 1974 “abuses of special interest dealing.” A big difference, unless you've taken some effort, you'd know little about the damning case against the president and the decade long influence peddling scheme of Biden Family Inc., most atrociously in the Ukraine and with the president's new proclaimed enemy, China. An important difference since 1974 is the role of the media, or the press as it once was more popularly referred. In 1974, the press, for example Greider's Washington Post, led the digging on the indictment and in general were much more rigorous fact checkers. In the Trump impeachments, the press served as a dumping ground of conjecture, streaming channels of misinformation, while continuously presenting largely trumped up bullshit as reality. In this newest impeachment, the press has remained overwhelmingly silent on the president’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, completely avoiding what they reveal about the greater profit machine that is DC, especially its now trillion dollar a year blood soaked war engine.
Do the Republicans have a case to impeach the president? Absolutely. Will it prove any use? Absolutely none. First and foremost, they need two-thirds of the Senate to convict and remove the president. If you want a sure political bet in 2024, bet that ain't going to happen. Washington is so systemically dysfunctional and corrupt, the idea of holding account Biden's petty ward heeler influence peddling, inflated to tens of millions in today’s overflowing pig trough of DC filthy lucre, means not a little, but nothing. Ask any person in DC, these aren't crimes, it is simply how things are done. Ask Paul Manafort or Tony Podesta about repatriating DC funded dollars from the Ukraine. The Republicans are just as guilty as the Democrats in DC's dysfunction and corruption, this impeachment is political opportunism, its specific merits matter not at all.
Greider's 1974 call to “render judgment not just on Mr. Nixon, but on the political past,” would be even more imperative today. I use would because unlike a half-century ago, today, there is zero chance of DC looking critically at how DC operates. Impeachment is now wielded freely in hyper- and increasingly extra-constitutional processes. In the wonderous words of the Tech industry, America accelerates to post-constitutional times. Allowing DC to set the political agenda, we the people find ourselves incapable, or more accurately, inconvenienced to even talk to each other. And if we the people no longer believe in each other, the idea of America is dead.
Thank you.