What is a “high crime”? We know what misdemeanors are, but contrary to slacker opinion, a “high crime” is not a crime committed while high.
I’m sure a lot of use are wondering, “Can’t that Dotard be impeached?” Yes, he can, but there are standards, specifically, those laid out in the Constitution: “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
So, I found the Constitutional Rights Foundation, which has a whole section on this topic. There’s the history of how the founders decided that there needed to be a means to remove the president if he were either incapacitated or behaving like King George:
James Madison of Virginia successfully argued that an election every four years did not provide enough of a check on a president who was incapacitated or abusing the power of the office. He contended that “loss of capacity, or corruption . . . might be fatal to the republic” if the president could not be removed until the next election.
So, the wording became important. There’s the story determining a reason to impeach an elected official, and how it was decided it was needed. After that, there’s the thread of the wording. It started as "treason, bribery, and corruption," then "treason or bribery" as the grounds. George Mason of Virginia proposed adding "maladministration," but that was dropped because it was too vague. Mason them proposed "high crimes and misdemeanors against the state," which the convention adopted, but dropped "against the state."
But, what are high crimes and misdemeanors?
Apparently, these people knew about a little something call the Oxford comma (long before Vampire Weekend made it into a song). So, the joke I did at the top, about “high crime”? See, that’s what most people get wrong. It’s not “high crimes, and misdemeanors.” If you were to write this mathematically, it would look like “high (crimes & misdemeanors)” In other words, you could be removed for a high crime or a high misdemeanor. Well, why didn’t they just write that out?
Apparently, the framers were not able to foresee that people wouldn’t be educated. It turns out that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been known for centuries:
The convention adopted "high crimes and misdemeanors" with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well. Since 1386, the English parliament had used "high crimes and misdemeanors" as one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of "high crimes and misdemeanors" were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping "suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament," granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.
Hmm. So, which of these high crimes and misdemeanors are already demonstrated? I’ll try making this into a bulleted list, and cross out the ones I don’t know off the top of my head. I’ve substituted “Congress” for “Parliament” below.
- misappropriating government funds (probably)
- appointing unfit subordinates (definitely)
- not prosecuting cases (unknown)
- not spending money allocated by Congress (probably)
promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates (that was the primaries)
- threatening a grand jury (maybe)
- disobeying an order from Congress (sanctions on Russia, anyone?)
arresting a man to keep him from running for Congress (not yet)
losing a ship by neglecting to moor it (although if anyone were capable of losing a ship...)
helping "suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament" (I don’t know British Law well enough)
- granting warrants without cause (probably)
- bribery (most probably)
So, it’s “official”; the president should be impeached. #TRE45ON