There are lessons to be learned from the past. Those flashes of clarity that come when you really drill down on a moment in time that you thought you already knew. That's when the switch flips or a ball drops and a curtain parts on the way forward.
I found one of those today.
For months I have lurked as the impeachment debate has raged through the diaries and comments. On one extreme... those who would have it at any cost, the sooner the better. On the other... those who would not have it at all. And in the middle, I suspect, are many of us who are leery of moving forward until the ground is firm.
Here's a brilliant bit of history that offers a both a context and a huge clue as to timing. It's a portion of the remarkable address by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan delivered on the opening day of the impeachment hearings in July of 1974. Hearings that did not start until the White House had openly defied both the Congress and the Supreme Court.
Note that.
To get to this point, there had been already been a half-dozen criminal convictions. There had already been more than a full year of investigations by Congressional Committees, investigations that took months of depositions and testimony from the likes of administration insiders and whistleblowers and the President himself on tape before impeachment proceedings began.
There's your timing. And, with a hat tip to IntrepidLiberalJournal, here's your frame, by way of Representative Barbara Jordan:
....The nature of impeachment is a narrowly channeled exception to the separation of powers maxim; the federal convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term, 'maladministration.' 'It is to be used only for great misdemeanors,' so it was said in the North Carolina ratification convention. And in the Virginia ratification convention: 'We need one branch to check the others.'
The North Carolina ratification convention: 'No one need to be afraid that officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity."
'Prosecutions of impeachments will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,' said Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, number 65. 'And to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.' I do not mean political parties in that sense. The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind impeachment; but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the constitutional term, 'high crime and misdemeanors.'
Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that 'nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction; but nothing else can.'
No hysteria... just cool, calculated reason, framed in historical precedent and law.
And then, and only then, she got into the specifics that long period of investigation- by the press, by the Congress, by the courts- had yielded:
.....At this point, I would like to juxtapose a few of the impeachment criteria with some of the President's actions.
...The South Carolina ratification convention impeachment criteria: Those are impeachable 'who behave amiss or betray their public trust.'
Beginning shortly after the Watergate break-in and continuing to the present time, the President has engaged in a series of public statements and actions designed to thwart the lawful investigation by government prosecutors. Moreover, the President has made public announcements and assertions bearing on the Watergate case which the evidence will show he knew to be false. These assertions, false assertions; impeachable, those who misbehave. Those who 'behave amiss or betray their public trust.'
James Madison, again at the constitutional convention: 'A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.'
The Constitution charges the President with the task of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, and yet the President has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregarded the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, concealed surreptitious entry, attempted to compromise a federal judge while publicly displaying his cooperation with the process of criminal justice. 'A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.'
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth century paper shredder.
Has the President committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? This is the question. We know that. We know the question.
We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question.
It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time."
Two weeks later, the President resigned.
Investigate first.