I said I was gonna talk about impeachment on its own terms, disassociated from political calculations, and I figured I could parlay this into the start of a series where I do this for other major bills and resolutions being considered by Congress. Hopefully most of these have less political sexiness than impeaching the President, but I’m writing a blog about Congress and Congress is only considering one thing right now. Welcome to On the Merits, a series on bills and resolutions on their own terms, away from the political calculations that I usually frame most American government actions as (“how will this help Democrats win elections” is something I ask more in my writings here than “is this good”). Let’s read closely through the five pages impeaching Donald Trump.

Fundamentally, it’s important to realize that impeachment is a ruling determined by political rules of what constitutes an overstep according to Congress, not an actual criminal conviction standard, it’s more useful to think of this as a vote of no confidence than a criminal indictment. I am not going to quote the boilerplate at the beginning, but once the article of impeachment actually begins I will go paragraph by paragraph:

The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that the President “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. Further, section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from “hold[ing] any office … under the United States”. In his conduct while President of the United States—and in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed—Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States, in that:

This sets up the premise for this impeachment, “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” has been interpreted differently every time an impeachment has come up, but in practice it means “Congress thinks you went too far”. Frankly if you read out the standard oath of office for federal officeholders in America “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” the specific Presidential oath just mentions “protect the Constitution” but the “foreign and domestic” is still implied, this is something Trump failed to do. There was a mob of people last Wednesday swarming the American federal legislature, and Trump more or less encouraged them instead of making any attempt to protect the constitutionally prescribed function of Congress in counting the Electoral College votes.

On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, DC. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide”. He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore”. Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.

The “pursuant to the 12th Amendment” gets at what I was attempting to get at in the previous paragraph, this is quite literally something in the constitution President Trump didn’t defend. Trump did in fact issue plenty of statements on his Twitter insinuating that the election was stolen over the past few months, tweets that I would link to, IF HE HAD THEM. Trump’s campaign and allies had a direct slogan entitled “Stop the Steal” ‘lest you think Democrats are putting words in their mouths. In addition to the aforementioned quotes Trump gave, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claimed that there needed to be “trial by combat” in DC on the 6th. The impeachment resolution is correct, I’m not sure that impeaching Trump is actually the best idea (though I think doing it and then the Senate sitting on it for a while is probably the best move) from a political perspective, but it is clearly correct on the merits to anybody who is looking at the actual words Trump is saying.

President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.

This is of course referring to the “can you find 11,780 votes” phone call that would’ve probably been the scandalous news story du jour had the events of the 6th not happened. This one is so hilariously bad that I can’t really add on. From there the impeachment document concludes.

In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore, Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. Donald John Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

And that’s it, I don’t have much to add here, but I really want to emphasize the reason that I’ve seemed conflicted about impeachment of Donald Trump is because of political priorities and how Dems might maximize their chances of winning. On the merits, Donald Trump is a particularly bad President who should not be allowed to pull this sort of thing and it’s good that he’s facing serious political consequences, not least of which is, you know, losing reelection.

Tomorrow: I don’t know yet, Congress is done for a while, I’ll go and find something else interesting to write about.

Obviously the main story of today is 25th amendment and impeachment things, but if given the opportunity to zig while most media is zagging I will take it, so let’s talk for a moment about Biden’s Secretary of Defense nominee: Lloyd Austin. This isn’t going to be some long article going into Austin’s qualifications and ways of thinking about the world and come to complex conclusions based on that. I don’t know the first thing about foreign policy, what I do know about is American political economy, and I want to look at a narrow part of this candidacy from that perspective.

Secretary of Defense nominees are required to have at least seven years of distance between them and their last job in the military if they happen to have worked in it. Congress can agree to waive this requirement, as it did for James Mattis in 2017, and it will have to do so for Lloyd Austin this year should he be confirmed as Biden’s Defense Secretary. This raises some interesting conundrums on the partisan valence of this issue that I think are worth considering. Democrats, as the generally less interventionist party on foreign affairs, have the natural instinct to be less willing to allow military personnel into the civilian chain of command. However, this is the nomination of a Democratic President that they would want to support. It leaves Democrats, and Republicans for the opposite reasons, in a bit of a pickle. Senators Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren, despite being obvious supporters of Biden’s agenda, announced they aren’t voting for the waiver. There was a committee hearing about it today, and I’d urge people to listen back to some of that, it’s a very interesting discussion that also shows how the Senate works at its best because of how it muddles partisan lines. Just a short article today, but I might follow back up on this when the waiver itself is up for a vote.

Tomorrow: A genuine look at the cases for and against impeachment, and an explanation on why I’m conflicted.

Back in the summer, I wrote an article discussing some ideological priorities of mine and made an attempt to ideologically categorize every sitting Senator on a four point scale based on how many of three ideological priorities of mine they met. At the end of that post, I specifically went out of my way to give a shout out to John Hickenlooper, my favorite of the also-rans in the 2020 Democratic primary, and a very likely to be victorious candidate for the Senate from Colorado. Lo and behold, polls were more or less spot on in Colorado and Hickenlooper easily came out the winner. Whenever there’s little actual Congressional action going on (though the last two days haven’t exactly been slow news days on any front that isn’t this narrow) I’ll try to use more zoomed out articles to help fill time. And on weekends in general this is more likely because Congress doesn’t tend to meet on them. Without further ado, this is part one in a number dependent on how many appointments and special elections there are part series on the new Senators of the 117th Congress, first up: John Hickenlooper (D-CO).

The Background

John Hickenlooper worked in private industry for a long time before becoming a politician. First as a geologist for an oil company and later as the co-owner of a brewpub company in Denver. It wasn’t until he was in his 50s that he became the mayor of Denver, a role he was successful in, before becoming the two term governor of Colorado despite his elections being in 2010 and 2014, the two best election years for Republicans in the 21st century. As governor of Colorado he governed as a pro-business moderate, but he still did the big important things Dems needed to do at that point, expanding Medicaid, fighting against the austerity commonly sought by Republicans in response to the Great Recession (a notably harder needle to thread at the state level than the federal level, where every budget dollar really matters) spending money on infrastructure in the state, moderate gun control measures that don’t risk as much alienation as it would in other states because of Colorado’s shift towards Democrats specifically because of their cultural liberalism. In general, the VA Dems and CO Dems are the models of what I like, because they’ve been able to shamelessly shape their politics towards the college educated, moderate on economics and liberal on cultural issues, and because of how college educated their states are, they can get away with it without paying a political price. This is the movement John Hickenlooper finds himself a politician from, supporting carbon taxes and immigration increasing while also standing firmly in favor of free trade, this is a liberal in the truest sense who welcomes the open society, and in the two states in America where that is the most politically viable option for Democrats, he can thrive.

In 2019 John Hickenlooper launched a bid for President that I imagine would have been more successful at some point in the past with a less crowded Democratic field and the increasing nationalization of American politics making it so that Senators are now preferred Presidential candidates compared to Governors. Either way he was clearly an also-ran from the start, but on the off-chance that he was silly enough to make it to any actual election, I would have endorsed him. After he dropped out of the Presidential race, Hickenlooper got started working on where he was more needed, to get to the Senate.

The Election

I’m frankly not going to spend too much time on this because the story of how Hickenlooper won is pretty boring, he’s very popular in Colorado and Biden had huge coattails in the state. He was the clear favorite to win the moment he stepped into the race, and the results show. He defeated former moderate Colorado Speaker of the House turned cosplayer-as-progressive-firebrand Andrew Romanoff (who couldn’t even muscle out the Bernie endorsement) by 17 points. Hickenlooper went into the election against unpopular incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner, who despite being a blue state Republican never tried to sell himself as any kind of Reasonable Moderate like a Susan Collins, up about 9 points in the polls, and he in fact won by 9 points. Interestingly a slight underperformance of Biden, a bit surprising given Hickenlooper’s local popularity and moderation, but I think it might have to do with just how toxic the Trump brand is to college educated people, who as mentioned, are the voters who shift power in Colorado. The man now has six years ahead of him to do what he wants in the Senate.

The Tenure

These sections will get bigger in later articles in the series as we actually have voting records to look at. There have been a grand total of two roll call votes in the Senate so far, and they were on overturning the election, something all but the most extreme Republicans in the Senate voted for. He posted an op-ed saying Trump should be removed, but the man doesn’t even have committee assignments yet. I will post a follow up article at a later date once we get a clearer read on how he plans to spend his six years in Washington.

Tomorrow: How do you impeach the President in 11 days anyway?