The US Senate Is About to Abolish Impeachment

A Trump acquittal, coupled with Clinton’s, will gut Congress’s most important check on presidential power.

The 45th president of the United States is reportedly “going crazy” after the House of Representatives impeached him Wednesday. But the biggest casualty of the current impeachment exercise isn’t Donald Trump’s emotional state. It’s the power of Congress to exercise the impeachment prerogative in the first place.

Trump is only the third president, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, to be called to account in this way. And in all likelihood, Trump will join his predecessors as the third to evade removal after trial in the Senate. A Trump acquittal, coupled with Clinton’s two decades ago, could mark the demise of impeachment as a meaningful lever of presidential oversight. Together, the outcomes of the two cases would represent a stealth amendment to the U.S. Constitution itself—a de facto elimination of Congress’s power to remove a president unfit for office.

The Constitution refers to impeachment a number of times, as an express means of removing “the Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts,” as well as “the President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States [for] Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Like any law, this language is only meaningful to the extent that it is effectively enforced. If drivers who park in a no-parking zone get no tickets, the law banning parking there means nothing.

So, too, with Congress’s impeachment power. The two most recent efforts are noteworthy not for the presidential acts deemed unacceptable by the House, but for the categories of misconduct deemed by the Senate to be inadequate grounds for removal.

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Source:The Atlantic