Yes, President Trump can (and deserves to be) Impeached for What He Did and Said

 Sand for your Oyster--Impeachment for Dangerous Rhetoric

For those who think Congress shouldn't be trying to impeach the President just for calling a mob to Washington and then encouraging them to march on Congress which was fulfilling its constitutional duties, here is Article 10 of the impeachment articles Congress passed in 1868 against the first President who was impeached--Andrew Johnson.

The bottom line is that Congress has the authority (and I think the duty) to impeach any president they find to be dangerous to the constitutional order. Trump's undermining of the public's belief in legitimate electoral processes, his attempt to get his Vice President to act against the Constitution, his attempt to threaten the officer of a state to change the election outcome, his intemperate rhetoric and calling a mob to come to Congress to build pressure against them fulfilling their constitutional duties all easily make the bar our Founders would have set for an impeachment.

 

ARTICLE 10. That said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches of the Government of the United States, designing and intending to set aside the rightful authorities and powers of Congress, did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof, which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain, and to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted; and in pursuance of his said design and intent, openly and publicly and before divers assemblages of citizens of the United States, convened in divers parts thereof, to meet and receive said Andrew Johnson as the Chief Magistrate of the United States, did, on the eighteenth day of August, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and on divers other days and times, as well before as afterwards, make and declare, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing, which are set forth in the several specifications hereinafter written, in substance and effect, that it to say: 

Sporran Episode 5--Cricket

Prudence--Let's find that virtue again!

Prudence

Well, we can’t (and shouldn’t) change the constitutional order anytime soon. That order produced a Donald Trump presidency, a moderately conservative Senate, and a liberal House of Representatives. None of them can or should act alone. Our only hope in the immediate future is to adjust our expectations along the lines once considered a virtue in politics, particularly conservative politics—prudence. 

Prudence means that we see the political order for what it is and what is actually possible. We look to the long-term health of the nation and the common good of our people, and seek to promote it within the actual possibilities of the moment within which we live and act. Our political leaders would benefit from a healthy dose of prudence that would allow them to work together, both sides willing to listen and compromise for the common good. 

Read my full article on government shutdowns, political divisions, deliberation, compromise, prudence here.

Yes Ideas DO Have Consequences--Read it!

Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences is a classic worth reading in the 21st century. Read my full essay on the book here, but below are some of his solutions--you know the problems!

 

Solutions

Weaver’s book is broken into two parts—the first tracing the history of the decline of the West due to the ideas spun off from the original attack on universal truths, and the second providing some idea of a means toward the restoration of order. 

How might we begin to undo the damage? First, by defending the individual’s right to private property, because in holding to his or her own property, a person may find some means of defending his or her privacy, fighting for truth, and may find some refuge from an encroaching state. In other words, property gives us a place from which we may take a stand.  

Second, he argues, we must reclaim language from those who have reduced it to sentiments, twisted it for political usage, and scrubbed it of common meaning with which we can seek truth and discuss our differences. 

Third, to counter the selfish egoism of modern man, we must return to a state of piety—piety toward nature, toward our neighbors, and toward the past. There is much wisdom for modern America to be found in Weaver’s diagnosis and in his prescriptions. 

Beyond the specifics of this important and challenging work, Weaver’s title reminds us that ideas can be powerful things to toy with—as likely to bring great damage as to serve progress. 

Whether or not we read Weaver’s great work again in the 21st century (and we would profit from it), we should at least use it to encourage us all to think—seriously think—about the potential consequences of new ideas, and to think about them, not only through the lens of temporary politics and our own emotions, but in terms of the long-term health of civilization itself. 

The events of the 20th century should ever remind us all of how close to the edge civilization resides and how consequential bad ideas can be.

Martin Luther King and Natural Law

Our educators and much of society have fallen into a subjectivism, where each culture, each group, each individual is to decide for themselves what they “feel” to be right and what is wrong, and is free to act accordingly. This subjectivism, King’s lessons would teach us, leaves us relatively powerless to fight truly immoral laws. If all is subjective, then no laws are truly unjust. Or, perhaps it’s better said that, if all is subjective, all laws are unjust to someone. Neither formula would support true freedom under the rule of law.

Read my full article on Martin Luther King and Natural Law

Re-reading Independence for July 4

Here are some thoughts on my article today on the Declaration of Independence. See full article here

First, we should remember what a bold and decisive stroke the Continental Congress executed by declaring our independence. They were committing treason. They were seceding from the country that had birthed them, protected them, and to whom they were pledged. We celebrate the document, but no matter what the document ended up saying, it was the act of declaring their independence that could get them hanged, and their homes confiscated or destroyed, leaving their families desperate. Still, they boldly declared they were independent.

Second, we should remember that these men weren’t actually “revolutionaries” in any modern sense; their “revolution” was really a secession. They were declaring themselves independent of the mother country, they weren’t attempting to overthrow the social institutions, economy, or religious establishment. They simply wanted to be free to govern themselves and let England govern itself as it pleased.

These men were conservative secessionists, in other words, not radical social reformers. Prudence, as political theorist Russell Kirk often said, is the great conservative virtue, and they demonstrated it: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them, under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” It would be hard to put the conservative vision for prudential change much better.

Third, there is much more to the Declaration than the famed second sentence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Remembering the evils of socialism/ communism

The Cold War came to an end more than a quarter-century ago. When the winds of change started to blow in the eastern bloc, and then the Berlin Wall finally came down, many of us wondered what the future would bring.

I remember in the summer of 1990 driving through the Shenandoah River Valley of Virginia with a veteran leader of the anti-communist movement and talking about what life would be like without the Soviet menace dominating our foreign policy.

“Will we forget what they were like, and will it be easier to bring socialism to America after the Soviet Union is gone because we have forgotten?” I asked. He agreed that this would be a great danger—America might forget the horrors of socialism when it was no longer an armed doctrine threatening our very existence.

Evidence that much of America has forgotten the horrors of socialism in the 20th century seems to be emerging on college campuses and among the citizenry. While those of us who grew up during the Cold War will find it shockingly hard to believe, socialism is growing as an approved political/economic system in America.

Read my full article on re-reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn