Forget the Founding Fathers, Lower the Bar on Impeachment

The founding fathers must be spinning in their graves. In the current impeachment battle, both sides incessantly invoke the framers of the Constitution, arguing that they never intended censure as an alternative to impeachment and trial, or that President Bill Clinton’s sexual malfeasance does not rise to the prescribed level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Just last week, Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, complained that “dumbing down the standard for impeachment” defies the wishes of the founding fathers and endangers future presidencies.

Today, the GOP majority in Congress has brought the nation to the threshold of a constitutional revolution. They are ready to change the nature of the impeachment process and lower the historic bar against the removal of an elected president. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) even asserted that ousting Clinton “could very readily destabilize the presidency, move to a randomness . . . that could degrade the republic.”

However Americans might disagree about his conduct, Clinton has clearly exercised poor judgment in his relations with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky. In the process, he lost the trust of a majority of the Congress. That alone might constitute grounds for his resignation or removal. Even if he survives a Senate trial, Clinton has neither the authority nor the influence to govern effectively. As commander in chief, Clinton will retain the power to act in the international arena, but without the cooperation of Congress, he has lost any opportunity to address the nation’s pressing domestic problems.

If the current rigid separation of powers were altered, Congress and the president would always have to be on the same page (with, ideally, early elections when they are not), and the federal government could then transact the people’s business more effectively. A lower standard for impeachment would point the nation in this direction. It would be consistent with earlier transformations in the constitutional system and would better equip the republic for the political challenges of the modern world.

Certainly, the current reverence for the founders would astound the framers of the U.S. Constitution. They lived through a time of frequent and extensive constitutional revision. Most of them joined in the writing and rewriting of numerous state constitutions before assembling in Philadelphia to produce yet another in a long line of political blueprints. Many assumed their handiwork would last only a generation or two; they certainly never expected their work to survive for more than 200 years. Indeed, they inserted into the Constitution a sunset provision, a mechanism for summoning a new constitutional convention to produce a revised plan of government for the nation.

Moreover, the great presidents of the 19th and 20th centuries hardly paid obeisance to the founders’ intentions. During the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln and his GOP allies wrought a constitutional revolution, abolishing slavery, creating national citizenship and extending the Bill of Rights. Without changing a word in the document, Lincoln also transformed a collection of sovereign states referred to in the plural (“the United States are”) into a singular and indivisible republic (“the United States is”).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt never altered the Constitution, except to repeal Prohibition, but his New Deal completely overhauled its meaning. Roosevelt shifted power from the states to the national government, and from the legislative and judicial branches into the newly created executive office of the president. The New Deal read into the national compact new powers and responsibilities--government guarantees of economic security and social justice that the founders never imagined and that contemporary constitutional authorities routinely challenged.

These earlier constitutional revolutions, these profound changes in the nature of the American political system, were precipitated by great national traumas: the Civil War and the Great Depression. Clinton’s conduct, even the most serious charges against him, hardly present a crisis of that magnitude. Whatever his fate, the republic will survive.

But the Clinton scandals do suggest that the nation might benefit from the routine and rapid removal of tarnished political leaders. In the rapidly changing and superheated political environment of the late 20th century, the ponderous process of impeachment and he awesome obstacles to removing a wounded president before his term expires may be outmoded. Why shouldn’t a chief executive who has lost his effectiveness leave office? Why should a president continue to govern without the confidence of the majority in Congress? Why should it take so much--high crimes and misdemeanors--for the American people to fire their man in the White House?

The president’s allies assert that his early resignation would demolish the constitutional standard for removing a president from office. These arguments are convincing. But constitutional revolution might mark an improvement over the current system. After all, in almost every other modern democracy, chief executives serve only as long as they retain the confidence of their legislatures. Once they lose that trust, whether by scandal, policy reversal or lackluster performance, their government collapses and new elections follow a few weeks later.

Just last month, disagreements about the Middle East peace process brought down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Without waiting more than a year for scheduled elections, Israeli voters can decide whether to replace Netanyahu or return him to power with a fresh mandate. How much better off would the United States be now, if the dispute over Clinton’s conduct had already been decided by a direct election?

Of course, the United States possesses no such parliamentary system (and it seems unlikely that two-thirds of the states will summon a new constitutional convention to create one). But just as Roosevelt altered the political system without changing the constitution, Clinton and his adversaries might erode the barriers against removing presidents from power. Like the New Deal, the result might strike some Americans as a constitutional travesty, an insult to the founding fathers. But it might also point the way toward more effective and responsive government.

For 25 years, the current balance of power has produced perpetual stalemate and, in the process, has poisoned U.S. politics. Divided government, with one party controlling the legislature and the other the executive, makes effective governance all but impossible. The rigid constitutional standard against removing officials for anything but criminal activities nourishes the very “politics of personal destruction” that Clinton says he so deplores and also encourages the endless scandalmongering and ceaseless investigations by independent counsels that so dominate contemporary public life.

In their cavalier and politically motivated impeachment of Clinton, the GOP majority in Congress has damaged the Constitution. But lowering the bar on impeachment just might initiate a subtle political revolution, propelling the United States closer to the modern parliamentary model. Pointing toward more effective and responsive government, it might redound to the nation’s benefit.