I find it very interesting, sad, and pathetic all at the same time how the National Republican Congressional Committee can acknowledge that the President of the United States has committed dozens of impeachable offenses....but yet not advocate for at least one single Article of Impeachment. They advocate for court proceedings that are certainly lawful, but not specified as the correct check for lawlessness in the Constitution.
Ladies and gentlemen please permit me to share with you a little about the Constitution and the framers intent on this beautiful Saturday morning from the Great State of South Carolina. If the President has committed this many impeachable offenses....and as one with some level of Constitutional expertise...I believe it is abundantly clear that he has....if the President of the United States has committed lawless acts in violation of his Constitutional oath, our elected members of the United States House of Representatives are DUTY bound to bring about at least ONE Article of Impeachment.
An Article of Impeachment is synonymous with an "indictment". The U.S. House of Representatives is made up of 435 members. 7 of those members represent South Carolina. Each state has a different allocation depending on population. The tool (known as a "check") in the founders system of Checks and Balances is written into our Constitution in Article I, Section 2, the last sentence....it reads: "The House of Representatives ....shall have the sole power of Impeachment".
It doesn't say that the House and "the Senate" have this power....it says that THE HOUSE has this power. Alone. We don't teach our Constitution anymore in our schools....yea, if you're really lucky today....a school might hand out pocket Constitutions on September 17th, but even the basics are not taught anymore. I submit that this is intentional...but I digress.
You see, too many people today completely misunderstand the process of "checking" lawlessness in a branch of the federal government. Sadly even the congressmen that I have spoken to have no in depth understanding of this either. Some of their staffers are even worse....but I digress. I don't mean that to be ugly or disparaging...it is just a fact of life today that since we don't teach this anymore...we have a very large portion of our congress that simply do not understand constitutional principles....and their staff sometimes (not always) reflects the same.
When it comes to the ultimate "check" on an elected or appointed official that violates the United States Constitution, or for that matter...even commits a misdemeanor (since the threshold for impeachment is actually very low)....when it comes to that "check", the framers designed a two step process for removal of that individual from office. There is "Impeachment"....which is not removal...it simply is the process that the framers gave to the U.S. House of Representatives to bring about charges...it does not mean or determine removal. Impeachment is given to the House as I mentioned above in Article I, Section 2. Removal from office can only come from a trial conducted in the U.S. Senate and is outlined for the Senate in Article I, Section 3: "The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments".
Each House under our Constitution, has completely separate and defined powers, the framers intended for one House to act independently of the other. This does not mean that they cannot and should not coordinate....but at the end of the day....each House in our bicameral congress has "swim lanes" of power. In other words, they are to have tunnel vision when it comes to exercising their defined powers. We know this because of the historical record in the debates at the Philadelphia Convention that produced our Constitution. The great "Connecticut Compromise" was part of this...the idea to split our congress into two co equal "Houses"....had to do with representation and also had to do with separating powers to try to prevent collusion on issues of national importance. The House was designed to be closest to the people hence the nickname the "Peoples House". Members of the House would be put on a very short leash (2 year terms) specifically for this purpose. This very same separated function is designed for spending also....but that is another topic for another day...but suffice it to say that spending is supposed to work the very say way...with complete separation of power. The founders wanted to make it VERY difficult to spend the peoples hard earned money. We give them a pass on this too...but alas I must return to my main point here.
Unfortunately, most people today do not know this....because they simply are not taught this (you might begin to see why I believe that it is by design that we don't teach this today). Since we are not taught this....we are quick to swallow hook line and sinker the garbage given to us by our Congressmen that they cannot draw up an Article of Impeachment because they don't have the numbers in the Senate. This answer and line of reasoning has absolutely no constitutional basis whatsoever. In fact, not only does it not have any constitutional basis, it is an affront to the design or our Constitution and the doctrine of Separation of Powers that was so wisely inserted into our very unique Constitutional Republic.
So the President today can pretty much do anything he wants...and our United States House of Representatives will do absolutely nothing of substance. I can list the excuses for you..."we will lose our committee assignments", "we don't have the numbers", "the Dems and media will beat us up and call us bad names".....and on and on....sickening. Yet we continue to cheer for them. Until we are willing to band together...and pressure even our "good" guys....they will do nothing. They have no fear of us because we clap for them doing the minimum for us.
Please consider joining the effort to stop giving your congressman, whoever he is a pass on this. In South Carolina, 6 out of our 7 congressmen claim Constitutional Conservatism as their political philosophy. None of them....not one of them will lift a finger to draw up a simple bill to submit on the House floor as an Article of Impeachment. We applaud them for their good conservative votes...and rightfully so. I think it is time that we raise the bar on these folks that we have elected and are paying 174K per year. I think it is time that we quit clapping like seals when they do the very minimum that a Constitutional Conservative should be doing....voting right.
If you do not believe that our President has violated the United States Constitution. Then you are free to disagree with me....honest people can disagree.
HOWEVER....IF you believe that the President has violated the Constitution, the framers gave only one clear way to deal with that kind of lawlessness....the gave the House the Constitutional "check", indeed, they gave them the SOLE responsibility to bring about an indictment....irrespective of whether the OTHER House will convict the defendant. Indictments do not always bring about convictions. But the process designed by the founders simply CANNOT work as designed if the 435 member House of Representatives refuses to do its constitutional duty regardless of their reasoning.
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