Trump: “If the partisan Dems ever try to impeach, I would first head to the Supreme Court.”
Most comments and commentators say rightly that the Supreme Court has no role in impeachment. They think that Trump doesn’t understand this.
However, they overlook the creativity of Trump and his lawyers. The Constitution allocates certain powers to a president. What if the House of Representatives were to harass the president in the execution of his duties? What if its attacks impeded or obstructed the president’s capacity to do his job? What if impeachment were a disguised form of political harassment and obstruction? What if there were no real grounds or basis for the harassment?
To harass means to hound and to intimidate, to trouble and to provoke. What if Congress interferes with the president’s capacity to conduct foreign policy and act as commander-in-chief?
What if an impeachment and its component actions that include issuing subpoenas for tax returns and other records have political motivations? What if they amount to hounding the president from office for no sound or good reasons?
What if the House misuses its impeachment power? Does this not represent a blow to government itself and a blow to the Constitution?
Hillary Clinton’s op-ed of today makes false and/or exaggerated charges: “Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people.”
Russian interference hasn’t been shown to have done any of what she charges. Mueller may have reached a “definitive conclusion” from his belief, but it’s not definitively proven by him. Hillary is still trying to justify her defeat by blaming the Russians.
But if she and her supportive media friends think that the “democracy” has been seriously assaulted by the Russians, what about if Congress assaults the Executive branch and really does seriously interfere with its workings? What if it does this for 2 years based upon nothing but false reports, made-up dossiers, leaks, illegal spying, behind-the-scene machinations, unproven accusations and innumerable false media stories?
What if a president’s work has been impeded for 2 years by accusations of collusion for which there has been no proof? What if the same Mueller report finds no such collusion? What if this same report had access to many thousands of executive documents and even had access to all of the president’s communications with his lawyer, Michael Cohen? What if, even with all of this, no collusion with Russians could be found?
Doesn’t this prove that the president has been needlessly harassed and attacked for 2 years?
And then what if the House, controlled by the opposition party, nonetheless takes up the position that the president needs to be investigated even further? That his tax records need to be subpoenaed? That his every aide, his every word, his every position needs to be investigated ad infinitum?
Is this not a case of the House impeding the Executive in his constitutionally-mandated duties?
Why couldn’t Trump and his lawyers make a case by suing its harassers? And because the issue is not about impeachment per se but about the constitutional limits of one branch attempting to impede another branch’s work, why might this kind of case not eventually wind up in the Supreme Court’s lap?
Trump’s threat is not an idle one. He can flesh out the preceding outline or devise other outlines creatively. Justice will be served by such creations. This is exactly what is needed if we are ever going to be able to get the train back on its proper tracks.
What we should be hearing to make things better is an entirely different rhetoric. If voting systems are weak and vulnerable, they should be strengthened. If Russia wants peaceful engagement, there are many ways to move along that path; and Trump should not be impeded from doing so. If political campaigns are manufacturing false charges and employing the organs of government to ruin opposition candidates, this should be stopped by appropriate justice procedures. If systems are being hacked, the affected parties should take steps to improve them. If foreign parties are misusing social media to the detriment of elections, ways should be found to minimize their impact.
All sorts of constructive actions await the doing. Meanwhile influential Democrats and Republicans continue in the fruitless and negative quest to neutralize Trump.
8:40 am on April 25, 2019
