{"id":5994,"date":"2019-08-02T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-02T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/?p=5994"},"modified":"2019-08-01T13:57:23","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T19:57:23","slug":"should-we-impeach-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/2019\/08\/should-we-impeach-donald-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Should we impeach Donald Trump?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In the wake of the failure of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives, I\u2019ve decided to read up a bit on the process. To be fair, the publisher sent me Gene Healy\u2019s monograph\u00a0Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution\u2019s Impeachment Power<\/em><\/a> long before the impeachment vote took place. But I\u2019m just now getting to it, because that\u2019s how summers work these days.<\/p>\n

Indispensable Remedy<\/em> is short, lucid, accessible, and definitely worth reading. It is also historically rich, careful in its analysis, and largely without partisan bias. If you\u2019re looking for a definitive statement as to whether or not Donald Trump should be impeached, despite the click-bait title of this review you\u2019ll not find the answer in\u00a0Indispensable Remedy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Instead, you\u2019ll find a brief history of impeachment and a thorough analysis of what the specific language of the Constitution might mean. Just what is a \u201chigh crime\u201d or \u201cmisdemeanor\u201d in the context of the Constitution? (\u201cTreason\u201d and \u201cbribery\u201d are of course much more clear.) Healy gives thoughtful analysis of the Founders\u2019 discussions, subsequent examples of impeachments, and the language of later Constitutional actions.<\/p>\n

For example,<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018misdemeanor\u2019 should be understood in a broader sense: \u2018ill behavior; evil conduct; fault; mismanagement,\u2019 as it\u2019s defined in Webster\u2019s\u00a0American Dictionary of the English Language<\/em> (1828).\u201d (16)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So when we\u2019re thinking about what \u201cmisdemeanor\u201d might mean in the context of a President\u2019s behavior, it is less a question of something like jaywalking and more a question of whether he is doing or saying something that would fall under the category of \u201cevil conduct.\u201d What that is, of course, is subject to much discussion.<\/p>\n

Above all, Healy wants us to take away the point that impeachment is a critical tool in a republic, but it is also one which is not to be used lightly. At the beginning and at the end of the monograph, he warns us:<\/p>\n

\u2026the scope of \u2018high Crimes and Misdemeanors\u2019 shouldn\u2019t turn on one\u2019s opinion of any particular president. Partisans who lower the bar to impeachment in order to punish a president they revile\u2013or raise it to save one they support\u2013may, under future presidents, live to regret the standard they\u2019ve set. (1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is good advice, and advice which Christians on both sides of the political spectrum should carefully listen to. For those like me with a more conservative inclination, we are getting a reputation for blindly tying ourselves to one political party without regard to things we have said in the past about how political leaders ought to behave publicly. To use my own crowd as an example, in 1998 while the Clinton impeachment was going on the Southern Baptist Convention passed a \u201cResolution on the Moral Character of Public Officials<\/a>,\u201d but you\u2019ll have to work hard to hear that document being cited by certain prominent Southern Baptists these days. We ought to hold elected officials that we like to the same standard as those we don\u2019t. That doesn\u2019t mean we should automatically be in favor of impeachment, but it does mean that if we were charging at Bill Clinton for his moral failings, we should be at least as critical as Donald Trump without rationalizing it away \u2018because the other side is worse.\u2019<\/p>\n

For those on the progressive side of the aisle, the same principle applies. You need to be consistent in your analysis. If the previous President got numerous passes because you happen to agree with his policies, the current President should as well however much you may disagree with his political positions.<\/p>\n

In either case,\u00a0Indispensable Remedy<\/em> is a useful tool (not quite an indispensable one, alas) for helping us think well about a part of the Constitution that is very much in the political atmosphere these days.<\/p>\n

Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the\u00a0City of Man Podcast<\/a>\u00a0and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of “Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power” by Gene Healy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1469,"featured_media":5997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[171],"class_list":["post-5994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nShould we impeach Donald Trump?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Review of "Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution's Impeachment Power" by Gene Healy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/schaeffersghost\/2019\/08\/should-we-impeach-donald-trump\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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