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A Falconer Shouts
There’s a reason why scholarship on impeachment is sparse.
High crimes and misdemeanors are not normal. Except when they are.
Intelligence services of hostile foreign powers do not manipulate elections in the United States. Except when they do.
The Founders of these United States were not slavishly devoted to history but rather, understanding the human lust for power in the historical record, sought to create institutions that could stand athwart that sorry spectacle of blood and destruction and venality and prevent infestation of North America by checking presidential power with legislative power checked with judicial power.
If, contrary to Thomas Jefferson’s protestations, the Third Branch had the power to void acts of the others, then what would prevent judicial tyranny? Judges lacked the tyrant’s tools. The President had the military. The Congress had the purse. The Supreme Court’s supremacy was backed by nothing save the persuasion of a well-reasoned opinion, and the reach of that opinion would be cabined by the laws on which the Court opined and even that limited opinion could not be written until the Court was presented with a case or controversy by persons not sitting on the Court.
The Nixon impeachment was shocking not because it was based on a cover-up of such low grade criminality but because it was…
