If you have been wondering if or whether President Trump has committed an impeachable offense then yesterday (April 5, 2017) may have been such a day or at least one of them.
He might have done it when he accused Susan Rice of committing a crime.
As president he is the nation’s chief magistrate and, as is so often declared and proclaimed, we are a nation of laws, not men. Or are we? Or are we going to be?
Presidents do not accuse. Prosecutors do. Presidents do not prejudice legal rights. Judges protect those rights. Presidents don’t judge. Juries do.
A presidential accusation of a crime by another person, a charge against a citizen of the United States, even with proof of evidence and understanding of the law – and the president has neither — would itself be a glaring violation of the Constitution and the rights that attach through and from it — particularly in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments because, as the lawyers say, due process attaches and provides equal protection under the law. It attaches to all of us and all of us have constitutional rights from that attachment.
Then for a president to make — without due process and without a scintilla of evidence — to make a baseless accusation that a citizen has committed a grave federal crime perhaps crosses a line the Constitution draws with considerable breadth.
The Constitution says a president may be impeached for “…treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Notice that it identifies only two precise acts — treason and bribery. All the rest that a president might do to forfeit his office is left to fit within the term “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
You can read volumes about what “high crimes and misdemeanors” are or could be. The term goes back to medieval English common law and is encompassing and flexible. The common sense understanding how to understand the phrase is that if something is as clear as day, as plain as the nose on your face – all those nostrums for patently obvious — then it is as it seems.
If it is something a high ranking public official clearly should never do; if it exerts the power of that official unjustly, unfairly and in contempt of the law against other people, but especially against one person; if it victimizes a class of citizens or even one citizen, then it might be construed to be a high crime or a misdemeanor because a fair reading of the language is not that a high crime is a misdemeanor, but that an act in violation might be either one or the other or could be both.
There is no higher or greater power in this nation than that held by the president. There is no more solemn public duty in this country than that owed by a president to his oath of office.
If you do that reading about high crimes and misdemeanors (with or without a law degree and needing only level headed common sense) you will know it is a dubious proposition for a president to threaten a private citizen with criminal prosecution, a threat sewn not even out of invisible cloth but from tattered rags that dress a demagogue.
Is it a threat that thus could be construed to violate the presidential oath set down in the Constitution?
The constitution promises us all due process under law. A presidential accusation, real, imagined or groundless as the one against Ms. Rice is one thing for sure. It is an abnegation of due process.
Someone needs remind the president that yes, indeed, he is the president and entered that office 73 days ago when he swore an oath that says, – “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Can there be, could there be a higher crime or graver misdemeanor than if a president were to violate the Constitution, fail to preserve it, disdain its protection, give up any defense of it by violating the rights of an American citizen to equal protection under the law — thereby erasing protection of the rights afforded us in and by the Constitution itself and so poison the well of justice?
Every day, the toll mounts, a toll that can only be collected by the House of Representatives, which is the body to which the Constitution gives “…the sole power of impeachment”. If the House so votes, then the Constitution gives to the Senate the sole authority to try an impeachment case and render a decision.
The Constitution is also quite clear that if the Senate convicts for impeachment and causes removal of the impeached person from office “…the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to the indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”
I think most remember the moment Khizr Khan addressed then candidate Trump and said:“Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words liberty and equal protection of law”.
It is past time the president took up Mr. Khan’s offer.
Peeling the Onion 