The Efficacy of Principled Impeachment

A left-right alliance could begin to undo the oppressive establishment and stop the perpetual war machine.

Injured Iranian journalist Younes Shadloo reporting outside the bombed IRIB studios

I went to an event Tuesday night on Iran at the progressive venue Busboys and Poets.

A refrain of the evening was how people were surprised that they were agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been posting against war with Iran.

That’s really not so surprising to me. Lots of major issues lend themselves to left-right alliances, from war to civil liberties to trade to Wall Street bailouts; see my piece from 2013: “The Perennially ‘Unusual’ Yet Somehow Ubiquitous Left-Right Alliance: Towards Acknowledging an Anti-Establishment Center.” This insight is key to my VotePact.org election strategy.

Another refrain of the evening was to back the War Powers resolutions introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.

While such an approach might help galvanize people to push their alleged elected representatives, it has been criticized by the late Francis Boyle and by Bruce Fein as effectively prioritizing the War Powers Resolution of 1973 over the Constitution. Fein writes me today: “Trump has usurped the war powers clause of Congress, article 1, section 8, clause 11 and should be immediately impeached and removed from office.”¹

Of course impeachment has often been used for partisan purposes.

I’m not talking about that.

Consider these examples:

• In 1991 Rep. Henry B. González introduced an impeachment resolution charging that George H. W. Bush “in violation of his constitutional oath” was initiating war against Iraq while he “has not received a declaration of war by Congress, and in contravention of the written word, the spirit, and the intent of the U.S. Constitution has declared that he will go to war regardless of the views of Congress and the American people.” George H. W. Bush would later write in his memoirs about his fear of impeachment — that if the Gulf War “drags out, not only will I take the blame, but I will probably have impeachment proceedings filed against me.” This may have led Bush to limit the scope of the war and not try to oust Saddam Hussein in 1991.

• In 2017, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, and foreign policy speechwriter, told Politico that President Obama feared impeachment if he targeted the Syrian government.²

So, it appears that fear of impeachment might actually curtail US presidents from their most aggressive tendencies.

Last year, as Biden bombed Yemen without authorization, many in Congress called it unconstitutional, but none moved to impeach, I attacked that here.

So, now, it may make sense for some congressional representatives to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump. They should:

• Make clear that they are not doing so for political reasons. They should pledge to do the same for any president of either establishment party violating the war powers provisions of the Constitution.

• They should highlight that it is their duty to impeach genuinely unconstitutional acts. Congresspeople, particularly those who seem to take exception to the establishment at times, often act like influencers. Tweeting is not governing. They should use the legal powers they have. Indeed, they must uphold their pledge to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

• They should ideally be one or more Democrats and one or more Republicans. This would highlight the first point. And it would be a step towards the needed realignment of politics in the US envisioned by VotePact.org — so that the public and members of Congress are not effectively enslaved to various parties or factions. By pairing up, they get protection.

• This transpartisan nature — say, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene teaming up with someone like Rashida Tlaib — will be attacked, but it will be hard for the establishment to ignore. Leading warmonger Lindsey Graham commented back in 2010: “You know what I worry most about: an unholy alliance between the right and the left."

There is a pressing need to make Graham worry.

Articulate statements with legal force by a few members of Congress organizing themselves in such a transpartisan fashion could be a step in breaking the oppressive establishment duopoly and especially the perpetual push towards war that it continuously manifests.

Related piece:

1. As a political matter, removal from office could be problematic with Vance as vice president. This does not affect impeachment as an initial remedy.

2. I have also speculated at times that Obama didn’t target the Syrian government more because they wanted Syria to be more of a “failed state” — let it twist in the wind so that whatever government came after Assad would be weak. And it’s possible the same dynamic was at play in Iraq through the 1990s.