Based on facts known, House leadership has commenced an “impeachment inquiry” of President Biden, an undertaking likely to span months and roll into an election year. What can we expect? Three positives.
First, this House impeachment process – if conducted like impeachments prior to the snap ones in 2020 and 2021 – will offer Americans a chance to learn, to see due process work, and to recalibrate. The chief goal should be educating the American people – about both due process and the material facts.
Second, in a time marked – and frankly marred – by emotional hyperbole, arch partisanship, and the kind of alternating control of “government by faction” our Founders feared, this may prove the opposite.
Ironically, while impeachment was intended as a rare response to executive incapacity, corruption, or treason – even if not recently seen that way – it was a credible, needed way of discussing the executive.
In a time when free speech, honest dialogue in the “public square,” has been compromised – on everything from criminality of a president’s family and election integrity to public health – the opening of a credible, open, honest, and unfiltered discussion about this president’s behavior is welcome.
As the Founders knew, impeachment could be abused, either forcing a president to give up his constitutional powers to Congress or causing partisanship to rip through Congress, unbalancing the branches, if conviction were made too easy.
That is why they insisted that the process be used only when serious crimes were alleged and why they insisted that the Senate vote to convict of impeachment be on two-thirds of the chamber.
As the Constitution says, paired with Fifth Amendment guarantee of “due process,” impeachment of a “President, Vice President, and all civil Officers” is intended only for allegations of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” To misuse it for partisan aims would have revolted the Founders.
Prior to the ill-conceived, swiftly secured House impeachments in 2020 and 2021, the process was historically viewed as rare, revered, and used only when crimes touched on the foregoing; thus since the Republic’s beginning, it had been used only 19 times, and only three times involving a president.
As of this date, three presidents have endured House impeachment, Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump – none convicted in the Senate. Richard Nixon, who might have been, resigned.
That said, impeachment was the remedy for treason, bribery, or other serious crimes. That is why questions swirling around Joe Biden – relating to bribery, cover-ups, possibly sale of his office to foreign governments – are entirely appropriate, right down the middle, exactly what the Founders intended.
In such circumstances, James Madison called impeachment “indispensable . . . for defending” the nation against “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate,” and why Elbridge Gerry, another Founder, noted that “a good magistrate will not fear” this remedy, while “a bad one ought to be kept in fear” of removal by impeachment.
Of course, removal would be an empty letter, no remedy at all, if political allegiance became more important than assuring honesty and capacity in the highest office. This is why the Founders insisted on both chambers being involved and a two-thirds vote.
The Founders were smart, arguably smartest about what brings a man down, what plagues all humanity, the vices and temptations that can corrupt elected leaders, and the ways in which power can be abused, public trust betrayed, and a republic fail.
In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued one reason for ratifying the Constitution was impeachment, a check on powers being abused and a reliable way we would be protected “from the abuse or violation of … public trust… injuries done immediately to the society itself,” which then required “the prosecution of them.”
All this brings us back to this new impeachment inquiry. If it will educate the public and offer a credible source of new information – trustworthy information in a time of untrusted sources – it is already a good thing.
Third, here is the rub: To those willing to read all sources, left, right, and center, open-minded enough to read implicated laws, including federal bribery, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the RICO statute, then look at what is already on the public record – this President is already over the line, in serious trouble.
Put differently, Americans of all stripes should want this inquiry, if we still believe that the nation is more important than faction, because much that already exists and is hard to argue points to the kinds of crimes the Founders thought warranted an impeachment, and why they put this clause in the Constitution.
Like it or not, this impeachment inquiry is timely, and conducted pursuant to due process, could become one of the most important in the Republic’s history.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
