Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Perspective: How to Remove a President Who Fails to Perform the Constitutional Duties?


The Founders became students of both good and bad governments, and from their findings they created our Constitution. This document is one of the most precise, understandable and brief government documents ever written. A copy should be on every citizen’s night stand for easy reference.

The Constitution provides for three equal and separate branches of government:
• The Legislative which creates and passes the laws and controls the purse,
• A Judicial that determines when the laws meet the requirements of the Constitution
• A President who is expected to faithfully carry out the laws.

The Founders anticipated there would come a time when there would be a need to replace the President for failing to perform the Constitutional duties. Accordingly, they placed in Article II Section 4 of the Constitution “Impeachment for High Crimes and Misdemeanors”. The process requires a majority the House of Representatives to impeach the President, and it requires two thirds of the members of the Senate to Convict and remove the President. The Constitution specifically 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”.

Those who have researched the Framer’s intentions believe that the Framers used the word “High” to mean a person in a high place, not that the crime be high. In other words, the Framers believed the President of the United States is under a special obligation not applicable to the ordinary person, and by this the Framers meant that the President is legally responsible for everything that he and everyone in the executive branch is doing, and moreover, the President is not protected by “plausible deniability”

The Framers were familiar with the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” because the English Parliament used the term since 1386. In Britain it covered such offences as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting offences, not spending appropriated money and disobeying a Parliamentary order.

It is clear from their writings that the Framers wanted the power to rest with the citizenry. The Declaration of Independence contains there words paraphrased here: All men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable Right and to secure these Rights, governments derive their Powers from the Consent of the Governed. Moreover, for this to be effective, the Framers believed that the citizenry needed a strong moral structure based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. The writings of the Framers are full of this sentiment.

The idea of impeaching the President has arisen three times since the Republic was formed. The first was Andrew Johnson who was impeached but not convicted for illegally firing his Secretary of War. The second was President Nixon for his “obstructing and impeding the administration of justice” regarding the cover up of the Watergate break in He resigned for fear of being impeached. The third case was President Clinton who was impeached by the republican House for “willfully corrupting and impeding, for his own personal gain and exoneration, the administration of justice”, but a democrat controlled Senate refused to convict him.
It is interesting to consider the three cases in light of the question of the morality of the citizenry and their representatives. Johnson had morality on his side. He wanted to follow Lincoln’s wish to restore the nation. But Northern politicians hated him because the feelings left from the war were too strong. In article 1 of the impeachment Johnson was accused of illegally firing his Secretary of War. The law he violated was subsequently found to be unconstitutional, but he missed being convicted by just one vote.

Nixon was clearly immoral and illegal. He deserved to be impeached and removed from office as well. Democrats were of this opinion, and the republicans of Nixon’s own party were of the same opinion, so conviction would surely have followed impeachment in Nixon’s case.

Clinton was clearly immoral and illegal, and he also deserved to be removed from Office. DNA evidence proved that he had sex with a entrée level government employee in the Oval Office, about which he lied to the public via national television and to a grand jury. What made the Clinton case especially egregious was that there was a law on the books that prohibited sexually harassing an employee, and the women’s organizations were consumed by actions to strengthen such laws in the work place.

Notwithstanding this, democrat Senators to a person refused to convict Clinton. What was especially interesting is that the Senators and the public at large did not think it a big deal to lie about such a sexual matter. This despite the democrats believing they were the party that championed women’s rights.

What is even more amazing politically is that the democrat Senators could have taken the moral high ground and won high stakes, as well. You see, they could have had Vice President Gore finish the final two years of Clinton’s term and then Gore would surely have been elected to two terms on his own. In short had they voted to convict they could held the White House for ten years and showed how important protecting the women is to them to boot!! To this day we have no explanation from any of them, or the media or in fact anyone as to why they did not do the honorable and moral thing which would have permitted the Framers to sleep peacefully into eternity.

Today, we are faced with impeachment issue once more. The current resident of the executive office has violated his vows as President often enough so as to make Clinton’s case look like a walk in the park!!

Here is a partial list of Obamas’s high crimes and misdemeanors.

• Failing to execute existing laws
Failure to vigorously enforce the immigration laws
Changing the Affordable Care Act
• Dereliction of duty
Refusing to fire incompetent subordinates
Having to read in the newspapers of employee's malfeasance
• Failure to protect the US from Jihadist attack

One could consider it a deliberate mishandling of the various issues in the mideast including encouraging the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and other African nations as well as leaving the door open for Isis, the new
Al Qaeda, to gain a position in oil rich Iraq and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Each one of these high crimes should be measured against Obama’s boast upon being elected “To transform America”. He has surely achieved much of this goal. We are no longer considered the world’s leader, defender and upholder of democratic principles, and our country continues to be in an anemic phase of economic recovery because he has done everything he can to stifle job creation. The latter is particularly sad when one considers that with our low cost energy windfall and our lead in automation technology, high paying manufacturing jobs should come back. If you have this advantage why would you want to take it away by adding a 30% tax to fossil fuel without legal authority, by the way, and why would you want to have US companies continue to pay the highest tax rate in the world?

Perhaps it might help to explain this if one recalls that Obama is a Saul Alinsky protégé! Taken as a piece, it sounds like Obama has adopted Saul Alinski’s idea of destroying existing structures so they can be replaced by new and better ones. By the Framers’ standards Obama should be removed from office as soon as possible is before he does any more damage, which could be and probably will be considerable given that he has nearly three more years in office.

A book by Andrew C. McCarthy published this year focuses on this issue. The title of the book is “FAITHLESS EXECUTION Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.” He makes the case and includes drafts of Articles of Impeachment for removing Obama from office.

McCarthy also shows why it is so difficult to impeach a president. The answer is in the book’s title, ‘Building the Political Case’. Only when the public is fully aware of the high crimes and is sufficiently angry about it will their representatives have the resolve to take any action. It is interesting that the polls show that the voting is getting a belly full of this president’s wantonly refusing to perform his Constitutional duty in every category of importance. But do the voters have the moral fortitude to do the right thing is what the Founders want to know?

Maybe the Framers made a mistake in deciding on three branches of government. Imagine if we had a parliamentary form of government. In that situation the Prime Minister is the head of government who is elected from the parliament itself. If the members feel there is sufficient reason, they can have a vote of “no confidence” and that person is removed promptly!