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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, May 15, 2017
Trump must be impeached. Here’s why.
President Trump in the East Room of the White House on Friday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.
The time has come for Congress to launch an impeachment investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice.
The remedy of impeachment was designed to create a last-resort mechanism
for preserving our constitutional system. It operates by removing
executive-branch officials who have so abused power through what the
framers called “high crimes and misdemeanors” that they cannot be trusted to continue in office.
The
Washington Post's Bob Woodward weighs in on President Trump's decision
to fire FBI Director James Comey, and remembers the Saturday Night
Massacre and the Watergate scandal. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
No American president has ever been removed for such abuses, although Andrew Johnson was impeached and came within a single vote of being convicted by the Senate and removed, and Richard Nixon resigned to avoid that fate.
Now the country is faced with a president whose conduct strongly suggests that he poses a danger to our system of government.
Ample reasons existed to worry about this president, and to ponder the extraordinary remedy of impeachment, even before he fired FBI
Director James B. Comey and shockingly admitted on national television
that the action was provoked by the FBI’s intensifying investigation
into his campaign’s ties with Russia.
Even without getting to the bottom of what Trump dismissed as “this Russia thing,”
impeachable offenses could theoretically have been charged from the
outset of this presidency. One important example is Trump’s brazen
defiance of the foreign emoluments clause, which is designed to prevent
foreign powers from pressuring U.S. officials to stray from undivided
loyalty to the United States. Political reality made impeachment and
removal on that and other grounds seem premature.
No longer. To wait for the results of the multiple investigations
underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an
authoritarian leader.
Comey’s summary firing will not stop the inquiry, yet it represented an
obvious effort to interfere with a probe involving national security
matters vastly more serious than the “third-rate burglary”
that Nixon tried to cover up in Watergate. The question of Russian
interference in the presidential election and possible collusion with
the Trump campaign go to the heart of our system and ability to conduct
free and fair elections.
Consider, too, how Trump embroiled Deputy Attorney General Rod J.
Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, despite Sessions’s
recusal from involvement in the Russia investigation, in preparing
admittedly phony justifications for the firing on which Trump had
already decided. Consider how Trump used the vice president and White
House staff to propagate a set of blatant untruths — before giving an
interview to NBC’s Lester Holt that exposed his true motivation.
President Trump said former FBI Director James Comey told him he was not under investigation during an exclusive interview with NBC News on May 11. (NBC News)
President Trump said former FBI Director James Comey told him he was not under investigation during an exclusive interview with NBC News on May 11. (NBC News)
Trump accompanied that confession with self-serving — and manifestly
false — assertions about having been assured by Comey that Trump himself
was not under investigation. By Trump’s own account, he asked Comey
about his investigative status even as he was conducting the equivalent
of a job interview in which Comey sought to retain his position as
director.
Further reporting suggests
that the encounter was even more sinister, with Trump insisting that
Comey pledge “loyalty” to him in order to retain his job. Publicly
saying he saw nothing wrong with demanding such loyalty, the president turned to Twitter with
a none-too-subtle threat that Comey would regret any decision to
disseminate his version of his conversations with Trump — something that
Comey has every right, and indeed a civic duty, to do.
To say that this does not in itself rise to the level of “obstruction of
justice” is to empty that concept of all meaning. Obstruction of
justice was the first count in the articles of impeachment against Nixon and, years later, a count against Bill Clinton.
In Clinton’s case, the ostensible obstruction consisted solely in lying
under oath about a sordid sexual affair that may have sullied the Oval
Office but involved no abuse of presidential power as such.
But in Nixon’s case, the list of actions that together were deemed to
constitute impeachable obstruction reads like a forecast of what Trump
would do decades later — making misleading statements to, or withholding
material evidence from, federal investigators or other federal
employees; trying to interfere with FBI or congressional investigations;
trying to break through the FBI’s shield surrounding ongoing criminal
investigations; dangling carrots in front of people who might otherwise
pose trouble for one’s hold on power.
It will require serious commitment to constitutional principle, and
courageous willingness to put devotion to the national interest above
self-interest and party loyalty, for a Congress of the president’s own
party to initiate an impeachment inquiry. It would be a terrible shame
if only the mounting prospect of being voted out of office in November
2018 would sufficiently concentrate the minds of representatives and
senators today.
But whether it is devotion to principle or hunger for political survival
that puts the prospect of impeachment and removal on the table, the
crucial thing is that the prospect now be taken seriously, that the
machinery of removal be reactivated, and that the need to use it become
the focus of political discourse going into 2018.