Impeachment is a big deal. And if you try to impeach the president, you’ll quite literally break the news.
It’s no surprise that all of the major TV networks decided to replace their normal programming with the House of Representatives’ hearings on an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
Most Americans haven’t seriously thought about impeachment since former President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 – and that’s a problem.
Impeachment and removal from office is the final tool that Congress can use to hold the president accountable to the law. But because every president knows that a two-thirds Senate vote to remove a president from office is nearly impossible, any claim of “No one is above the law” is moot.
The solution: use impeachment every time it’s supposed to be used, whenever the president has broken the law. Yes, that means former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush should have been impeached and removed from office, too.
During September 2011, the Obama administration ordered and carried out a fatal drone strike against American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who they claimed was involved in planning operations for al-Qaeda, according to The New York Times.
The killing of al-Awlaki undoubtedly violated his constitutional right to due process, guaranteed by the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
In 2014, when the Obama administration was forced to hand over an internal memo that justified depriving al-Awlaki of his due process rights, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union described the memo as “disturbing.”
“[The memo is] ultimately an argument that the president can order targeted killings of Americans without ever having to account to anyone outside the executive branch,” ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said to the Los Angeles Times.
For those actions alone, President Obama should have been impeached and removed from office.
Former President George W. Bush on the other hand actually did see articles of impeachment drafted against him, but with no real consequences. After 35 articles were written by Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the House voted to refer the issue to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which did nothing
about it.
Some of the articles concerned the Bush administration’s use of torture on prisoners. CNN reported that Bush apologized for the American soldiers who tortured Iraqi prisoners.
However, Bush never revoked the Department of Justice memos that authorized the torture in the first place, effectively making him complicit in the
entire ordeal.
Another article alleged that under Bush’s watch, the National Security Agency engaged in overbroad and unlawful data collection. In April 2019, The New York Times reported that the NSA admitted it had violated U.S. law when it over collected data about Americans.
It’s no surprise that it came to light after the end of Bush’s presidency in 2009, when impeachment was no longer a threat.
And that’s exactly what impeachment should be – a threat to all presidents that if they choose not to follow the law, the American people, through Congress, will hold them accountable by removing them from office.
One would hope that if the impeachment process had real weight behind it, our last two presidents wouldn’t have dared to break the law in the first place.
In “Federalist No. 69” from 1788, founding father Alexander Hamilton explained that the impeachment process was one of the precautions taken that distinguished a president from a monarch.
“The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution,” Hamilton wrote.
And yet here we are, in the midst of what feels like a crisis of a national revolution. We absolutely need a real impeachment process, if only to ensure that our president is not a king.
