Tag: impeachment

Impeachment – let the people decide?

Listening to the news on NPR yesterday, we heard this:

HOST: Without being named, what are the president’s defenders saying on the record?

REPORTER: You know, they are saying that this process was flawed, that the president did nothing wrong, that he was fully within the bounds of presidential power and that the articles fall short of any sort of constitutional standard for removal.

But the argument that they are making again and again that they made at the beginning and the end of their arguments before the Senate is that there is an election just nine months away, so why not let the people decide? That’s what Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, said on the Senate floor:

PAT CIPOLLONE: What they are asking you to do is to throw out a successful president on the eve of an election with no basis and in violation of the Constitution. It would dangerously change our country and weaken – weaken – forever all of our democratic institutions. You all know that’s not in the interest of the American people. Why not trust the American people with this decision? Why tear up their ballots? Why tear up every ballot across this country? You can’t do that.

…remember our post on tyranny of the majority that we keep updating and re-posting every time gay rights are questioned? Hey, we’re posting it again!

Because what Mr. Cipollone suggests is that we bow to tyranny of the majority. He clearly says that if the majority of American voters want to elect a person who will violate our Constitution, we must let them do that. We must “trust them with that decision.” If voters don’t like violations of our Constitution, then they won’t vote for Trump again, and justice will be done.

But that’s not democracy and justice as we have established them in this country. If the majority of the people support injustice, there has to be a way to save the country from them–and there is. It’s called the judiciary, and, in this case, the impeachment process, which is a trial, and therefore overseen by the Chief Justice of our highest court.

If we concede that the majority of voting Americans want injustice (which we at the HP do not concede, but just for the sake of argument), we can’t just say “well, majority rules!” and let it be. The majority does not rule in the United States if they are attempting to institutionalize injustice. If the majority of Americans support a premise and practice that is unconstitutional, they are overruled. Because in the United States, our founding principles must be upheld, even if only by a minority.

In this moment, we must let an impeachment trial decide the matter, not the voters. Even if the majority of American voters went against Trump this fall, it would still be wrong to “let the voters decide.” Majority does not rule–the Constitution rules.

 

Here’s the original post, once again, ready to be fully applied to the validity of impeachment over election:

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The California Supreme Court’s decision that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional has been met with the by-now common complaint that the Court overstepped its bounds, trampled the wishes of the voters, and got into the legislation business without a permit.

A review of the constitutionally described role of the judiciary is in order.

The famous commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, talked a great deal in his books Democracy in America about the tyranny of the majority. This is when majority rule—the basis of democracy—ends up perverting democracy by forcing injustice on the minority of the public.

For example, slavery was an example of the tyranny of the majority. Most Americans in the slave era were white and free. White and free people were the majority, and they used their majority power to keep slavery from being abolished by the minority of Americans who wanted to abolish it. The rights of black Americans were trampled by the tyranny of the majority.

Before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the majority of Americans were fine with segregated schools. They used their majority power to oppress the minority of Americans who were black, or who were white and wanted desegregation.

In each example, the majority is imposing and enforcing injustice which is incompatible with democracy. They are tyrannizing rather than governing.

The judiciary was created to break this grip of majority tyranny. The legislature—Congress—cannot usually break majority tyranny because it is made up of people popularly elected by the majority. But the appointed judiciary can break majority tyranny because its sole job is not to reflect the wishes of the people but to interpret the Constitution.

If the judiciary finds that a law made by the legislature perverts democracy and imposes the tyranny of the majority, it can and must strike that law down. This is what happened in California. The court found that although the majority of Californians (as evidenced by a previous referendum) had voted to ban gay marriage, that majority was enforcing and imposing injustice on the minority. So the court found the ban unconstitutional.

This is not beyond the scope of the judiciary, it’s exactly what it is meant to do.

We heard a commentator yesterday saying the California court should have left the issue to “the prerogative of the voters”. But if the voters’ prerogative is to oppress someone else, then the court does not simply step aside and let this happen.

The same people who rage against the partial and biased justices who lifted this ban are generally the same people who would celebrate justices who imposed a ban on abortion. People who cry out for impartiality are generally only applying it to cases they oppose.

So that’s what the judiciary does: it prevents the tyranny of the majority from enforcing injustice in a democracy. Like it or not, the “will of the people” is not always sacred, and sometimes must be opposed in the name of equality.

 

 

 

Nixon Resigns… and passes the buck

Second to last post in our series on the Watergate Crisis; here we follow the crisis to its end, in President Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. The Smoking Gun tape released three days earlier evaporated any support Nixon had left in Congress, and the handful of its members who had voted against impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee said they would now vote for it when the full House voted. The night of August 7, two Senators and a Congressman met with Nixon and told him impeachment in the House and Senate was a certainty. Faced with this, Nixon decided to resign before he could be impeached.

It was a move true to his character. In a way, resigning before he could be impeached was just another form of being above the law—no one would impeach Richard Nixon. He would not submit to Congress in that way. He would get out before the law could be exercised on him, before democratic procedure could be completed.

Nixon gave two resignation speeches that were exemplars of his twisted logic. The first was to the nation, on August 8, 1974, where he said, in part,

In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future….

—That first sentence is breathtakingly deceitful. If Americans had learned anything by August 8, 1974, it was that Nixon was always out to do what was best for Nixon. He goes on to describe Watergate as a cross he has been forced to bear rather than a crime committed in his name that he himself covered up. Nixon then blames Congress for failing to support him, and forcing him to abrogate the “constitutional process” (by which he means serving his full elected term). To hear Nixon lament a breach of the Constitution at this point is, to put it succinctly, pretty rich.

I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations. From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.

—Again, Congress is the villain here. There is also a veiled threat (something Nixon was good at): there are “very difficult decisions and duties” the president must handle, but now, because of Congress, Nixon has to leave office, and it’s likely that the man to take his place will not be able to do as good a job handling these difficulties as Nixon.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

—Again, no one puts the nation ahead of personal interests like Nixon. Again, Congress is a villain. And again, the nation is in particular peril “with problems we face at home and abroad” and will likely suffer in Nixon’s absence, so in a way we, the American people, are also villains for failing to support Nixon, and we will get our just desserts.

The second speech was given the next day to the White House staff, privately. It was mostly impromptu, and rambling, and in places very weird. Nixon talked about his parents and how saintly his mother was, and he talked about Theodore Roosevelt’s struggle to recover from the death of his first wife. We’ll focus on the parts where he came closest to addressing why he was leaving office:

…I am proud of this Cabinet. I am proud of all the members who have served in our Cabinet. I am proud of our sub-Cabinet. I am proud of our White House Staff. As I pointed out last night, sure, we have done some things wrong in this Administration, and the top man always takes the responsibility, and I have never ducked it. But I want to say one thing: We can be proud of it — five and a half years. No man or no woman came into this Administration and left it with more of this world’s goods than when he came in. No man or no woman ever profited at the public expense or the public till. That tells something about you.

—In defending his staff, Nixon really places blame on them for the first time. No one had thought the Watergate cover-up extended beyond Nixon and his top half-dozen aides. By saying he is proud of them and that “we” have done “some things wrong”, and that as “top man” he has taken responsibility for those wrongful acts, Nixon really seems to be saying he took the fall for his entirely criminal staff. Then he seems to note that none of them ever made any money from their crimes.

Mistakes, yes. But for personal gain, never. You did what you believed in. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And I only wish that I were a wealthy man — at the present time, I have got to find a way to pay my taxes — and if I were, I would like to recompense you for the sacrifices that all of you have made to serve in government. We think sometimes when things happen that don’t go the right way; we think that when you don’t pass the bar exam the first time — I happened to, but I was just lucky; I mean, my writing was so poor the bar examiner said, “We have just got to let the guy through.” We think that when someone dear to us dies, we think that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended. We think, as [Theodore Roosevelt] said, that the light had left his life forever. Not true.

—Again, it’s the staff who committed the crimes—“you” did what “you” believed in, “Sometimes right, sometimes wrong.” And then again the odd swerve into talking about money. And then, after accusing his staff of crimes and of making him take the fall, he comforts them by saying they mustn’t worry about him, that the light has not left their lives forever just because he is leaving office. They will survive their grief at losing him, somehow.

It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

…Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

—Nixon’s suffering has made him great; it has purified him to the point where he can end with a parable. To hear Nixon, whom the tapes revealed to be one of the most petty men in public office, constantly pursuing old grudges and trying to harm people for small offenses, loftily telling people not to be petty is remarkable. To hear the man who hated just about everyone he ever met say you should never hate because then “you destroy yourself” is almost funny.

He was right, though; his hatred and pettiness did destroy him, and he lost while most of the people he tried to bring down won. Next time, we’ll go over the legacy of Watergate.

Next time: Why don’t we remember Watergate?

Leon Jaworski strikes back

Hello and welcome to part 6 of our series on the Watergate Crisis. Last time we described the Saturday Night Massacre, October 20, 1973, in which Nixon attempted to override the Constitution, establish an imperial presidency, and end the Watergate investigation all in one day. His efforts shocked a nation that had up to this point generally believed him when he said he didn’t know anything about the Watergate break-in. Firing the deputy Attorney General who refused to fire the Watergate special prosecutor whom the Attorney General had refused to fire, thus leading to the AG himself being fired, and then finding someone at last to fire the special prosecutor was pretty clear evidence of obstruction of justice on Nixon’s part, and seemed to prove that he was, indeed, involved in a cover-up.

The public was furious, and Nixon’s aggressive refusal to admit any wrongdoing only damned him further in their eyes. At a press conference on November 17, 1973, Nixon made his famous statement that “the American people need to know if their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Few were convinced. The new Attorney General Nixon had appointed—Robert Bork, the man who signed the paper he was told to sign to fire Archibald Cox—was forced to appoint a new Watergate special prosecutor to replace Cox. Leon Jaworski took over that role. He was a Washington lawyer who had believed the Nixon was not guilty of any criminal acts; only his advisors were. But after the Massacre, Jaworski was determined to get the full tapes of Nixon’s conversations. Just as Cox had done, he subpoenaed Nixon for the tapes, and once again, Nixon refused on the grounds of executive privilege. He added his assertion that the special prosecutor did not have the authority to sue the President—another attempt to put the president above the law. Knowing Nixon could drag this argument out for months, Jaworski went over his head to the Supreme Court.

In United States v. Nixon, on July 24, 1974, the Court ruled that the special prosecutor did have the right to sue the president, and that a president’s claim of executive privilege is overruled if he has evidence that is clearly pertinent to a criminal trial. The Justices may have been rankled by a statement made earlier in U.S. District Court by Nixon’s attorney James St. Clair: “The president wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.”

This is an unbelievably astounding statement. Nixon is not trying to camouflage his intent: he is an absolute monarch while he is in office, and “not subject to the processes of any court in the land”. No wonder St. Clair shamefacedly said “the president wants me to argue” this point. The Court responded to St. Clair’s statement by saying that no president had any claim to “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”

Nixon was forced to give the unedited tapes—all of them—to Jaworski, and the transcripts and some audio were made public.  They revealed a Nixon no one was prepared for: perpetually foul-mouthed, hostile, petty, vengeful, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, and criminal. So many four-letter words had to be bleeped out of the released audio and omitted from the public transcripts with the words “expletive deleted” that that phrase became a bitter joke to Americans, used by comedians to refer to the entire crisis. The “Smoking Gun” tape, in which Nixon talked about stopping the FBI criminal investigation of the break-in six days after it happened, which we cover in part 4 of this series, was released at last, and there was no way for even Nixon to pretend he wasn’t involved in the cover-up. Congress moved as one body to vote for impeachment, and there was only one thing left for Nixon to do: resign.

Next time: the dishonest end of a dishonest road