If there were any doubt that House of Representative Democrats were engaging in a corrosive partisan Impeachment effort, a recent development in their court case seeking to compel the testimony of former White House Counsel Don McGahn should dispel it. The partisanship that has characterized the impeachment effort heretofore has been manifest. First and foremost, the US Constitution provides “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as the specific grounds for impeachment by the House and removal of a president from office upon conviction by the Senate.
In the impeachment of President Trump, however, no identified crime of any nature found in the federal criminal statutes was alleged. What was alleged were the amorphous acts of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Democrats claim that since Impeachment is a political act, they can designate any act as fulfilling the requisite “crime,” since the Constitution vests the House of Representatives with “the sole power of impeachment.”
If this wasn’t troubling enough, consider what a House lawyer just told a federal appeals court in the McGahn case. One of the judges had asked why the request for the McGahn testimony was not moot since it was premised on its relevance to determining whether Trump should be impeached by the House and the House had already impeached him. The lawyer’s response was that the House may simply decide to impeach him again since the House had total discretion over impeachment.
If that lawyer is right and the House is unrestrained in what it can do, then the Constitutional notion of three co-equal branches of government – Executive, Legislative, Judiciary – is a nullity with Congress reigning supreme. There has to be some serious comeuppance for this sort of hubris.