The Patriot Files Forums  

Go Back   The Patriot Files Forums > General > Political Debate

Post New Thread  Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old 08-05-2017, 04:33 PM
Boats's Avatar
Boats Boats is offline
Senior Member
 

Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Sauk Village, IL
Posts: 21,784
Arrow Enforcement Clause

Enforcement Clause - AMENDMENT XIV, SECTION 5 & Privileges or Immunities
RE: http://www.heritage.org/constitution...rcement-clause

Following the pattern of the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I, Section 8, the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants to Congress the power to pass legislation directed at effectuating the provisions of Sections 1 through 4 of the Amendment. Like the enforcement clauses of the two other reconstruction amendments (the Thirteenth and the Fifteenth), as well as those found in the Nineteenth, Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments, Section 5 constitutes a delegated power granted to Congress in addition to those listed in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution.

One specific purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment when it was passed in 1866 was to ensure that Congress had adequate power to adopt the Civil Rights Act of that year, of which current 42 U.S.C. § 1981 is a descendant. That act prohibited state legislation—specifically, the notorious "Black Codes"—that denied blacks certain rights afforded to whites, including the power to make and enforce contracts.

A significant limitation in the text of Section 5 is that Congress is authorized only to "enforce, by appropriate legislation" the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.'s opinion in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966) suggested that Section 5 might also give Congress authority to define the substantive scope of the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, but this interpretation seems at odds with the text and history of Section 5, and more recent opinions of the Supreme Court have rejected it. As early as 1883 in the Civil Rights Cases, the Court declared that since the prohibitions of Section 1 of the amendment reached only actions committed by the state or its agents, Congress was not empowered to legislate against the discriminatory actions of private individuals. More recently, in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), the Court struck down as unconstitutional the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in which Congress tried to use Section 5 to overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision defining the scope of the Free Exercise Clause with respect to the states. In doing so, the Court explicitly rejected Justice Brennan's suggestion in Morgan that Section 5 allows Congress to expand the meaning of the rest of the amendment. Thus, for Congress to invoke its power under Section 5, the proposed legislation must be aimed at remedying or preventing actions that would violate some prohibition within the Fourteenth Amendment. The legislation cannot be aimed at changing the scope of the Amendment.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court has declared that Congress may, as a prophylactic matter, ban state actions that it has found to be generally violative of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if in some instances they might not be. A classic example is the literacy test for voting. See Oregon v. Mitchell (1970). In theory, a state could use such a test in a constitutional way, but Congress determined that these tests were so commonly abused that they should be banned across the board, and the Court upheld this ban. The law was aimed at preventing actual and potential violations of the Constitution; it did not change the Constitution's substantive meaning and guarantees.

In City of Boerne, the Supreme Court declared that there must be a "proportionality" and "congruence" between the statute "and the legitimate end to be achieved." It follows that, before Congress invokes its Section 5 authority, it must ascertain that the actions it is concerned about are in fact violative of the protections within the Fourteenth Amendment and that legislation remedying such violations has a "proportionality" and a "congruence" in accomplishing the remedy. This, in turn, requires a careful analysis of the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment and the scope of its guarantees.

For instance, there must be "state action." Section 5 gives Congress no authority to legislate with respect to the private sector because, the Court has held, there can be no Section 1 violation without state action. Civil Rights Cases. Likewise, with respect to religious discrimination, the state action must amount to intentional discrimination. The Court found in City of Boerne that laws that are neutral in text and intention and that have only a disproportionate effect on a religious group are beyond Congress's authority to prohibit. The same kinds of distinctions and limitations apply with respect to other antidiscrimination legislation, For example, because the disabled are not "a suspect classification," state discrimination against the disabled violates the Fourteenth Amendment only if it is "irrational." Thus, the Court has recently held in Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett (2001) that Section 5 gives Congress authority only to ban irrational state discrimination against the disabled.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Privileges or Immunities
RE: http://www.heritage.org/constitution...-or-immunities

Although there is no agreement concerning a single original meaning of the clause, it is possible to identify three distinctly different yet plausible and credible original understandings of the clause. This essay first describes in general terms the nature of the disagreement, and then discusses in more detail the contending interpretations.

The initial division of opinion is over whether the clause was intended simply to require the states to make their laws apply equally to all their citizens or to mandate a certain substantive content to state law. The equality argument reads the clause to say nothing about the content of a state's law; rather, it simply says that whatever the content of a state's law, it must be the same for all citizens. The substantive argument reads the clause to mandate certain content to state law—to prescribe or proscribe state law in order to deliver a substantive package of entitlements known as the privileges or immunities attaching to federal citizenship.

The substantive view is subdivided into two differing versions of the substance of the privileges and immunities of federal citizenship. The first view holds that these privileges or immunities consist of all of the rights and liberties contained in the Constitution, a category that includes such rights as habeas corpus and the protection against ex post facto legislation or bills of attainder, but, more importantly, the Bill of Rights, that is to say, the first eight amendments. Under this view, the principal function of the Privileges or Immunities Clause was to make the entire Bill of Rights binding on the states. A variant of this view is the contention that the clause was intended to do nothing more than to make the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. The second view is influenced by John Locke's view of natural rights and holds that the privileges and immunities of national citizenship are the natural rights of property and liberty possessed by free persons upon creation of government but never ceded to government.

The reason that it is so difficult to determine with confidence the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is that the proponents of the clause in the Thirty-ninth Congress, particularly Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio, were vague and sometimes inconsistent in their statements of the intended effect of the clause. Historical evidence outside the congressional debates is inconclusive. Although each of the three plausible original understandings will be discussed, it is useful to begin with some common historical background.

A central focus of the Thirty-ninth Congress, the body that drafted and proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, was to protect newly emancipated slaves from discriminatory state laws, especially the "Black Codes," which severely limited the civil and political rights of African-Americans. The first effort in that direction was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Section 1, which declared "all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed" to be United States citizens, and provided that all "citizens, of every race and color, without regard to previous condition of slavery...shall have the same right, in every State or Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws...for the security of persons and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens...."

Because some supporters of the Civil Rights Act were concerned that Congress lacked constitutional authority to enact the law, Representative Bingham proposed a constitutional amendment that was a precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment. Bingham's proposed amendment gave Congress "power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper to secure to the citizens of each State all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." Bingham's proposal was tabled because it did not go far enough. All it purported to do was to give Congress the power to provide by federal law "that no State shall discriminate between its citizens and give one class of citizens greater rights than it confers upon another," but it failed to bar the states directly (without such federal legislation) from excluding "any class of citizens in any State from the privileges which other classes enjoy." In its stead, the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed, but the Fourteenth Amendment addressed a number of important practical problems associated with Reconstruction, only one of which was the absence of authority for the 1866 Civil Rights Act.

Even though the text of the clause suggests substantive content to the privileges or immunities of national citizenship, the historical context credibly suggests that the clause may have been intended to require the states to make their laws, whatever their content, apply equally to all their citizens, rather than to proscribe or prescribe state law in any particular substantive manner.

The argument for the equality view is partly historical and partly textual and makes the following contentions. First, the Citizenship Clause of Section 1, which immediately precedes the Privileges or Immunities Clause, defines both national and state citizenship. Because a citizen of the nation is a citizen of a state (unless he resides abroad), the privileges or immunities of national citizenship necessarily include the privileges or immunities of state citizenship. Second, because both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses extend protection to all persons within a state's jurisdiction (rather than just citizens), the reference to "citizens" in the Privileges or Immunities Clause is best understood as a reference to a particular group of individuals rather than a reference to a particular set of rights. Third, although the debate in the Thirty-ninth Congress is not a model of clarity, it contains ample suggestions that many Members of Congress thought abridgement of a citizen's privileges or immunities consisted of state "legislation discriminating against classes of citizens" or that gave "one man...more rights upon the face of the laws than another man." Fourth, as a result of prior interpretation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment understood that the privileges and immunities of state citizenship were rights derived from state law, and understood that the function of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV was to ensure that states treated citizens of other states equally with their own citizens with respect to the privileges and immunities of state citizenship. Finally, when Congress debated adoption of what ultimately became the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade private racial discrimination by persons already subject to a legal duty to serve the public indiscriminately, Members of Congress grounded that proposed legislation in the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The idea that the privileges or immunities of national citizenship included substantive rights secured by the Constitution, especially those contained in the Bill of Rights, was partly grounded in the text of the clause, and partly in the comments of certain proponents of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, particularly Representative John A. Bingham, who repeatedly declared that "the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States...are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution." To be sure, Bingham was, in the words of one modern commentator, a "gasbag" who frequently failed to articulate the constitutional analysis underlying his pronouncements, and that failing has led many subsequent commentators to deride Bingham as "befuddled," "confused," and "distinguished for elocution but not for hard thinking."

This point of view was most notably expressed by historian Charles Fairman and by Justice Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Adamson v. California (1947). Fairman and Frankfurter argued that incorporation of the Bill of Rights would have immediately invalidated numerous practices of the states and that there was neither any indication that the framers of the clause expected this to happen nor any movement, after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, to alter such local practices to comply with the Bill of Rights.

Yet despite this dissonance and Bingham's failings as an articulate analyst, later interpreters of the record have argued that it was, indeed, the intention of the framers of the clause to make the Bill of Rights, along with all other rights associated with national citizenship, binding on the states. These commentators argue that such an intention was entirely consistent with the antebellum antislavery view of the Constitution, comports with the clause's textual suggestion of substantive content, and reflects the framers' lack of concern with or ignorance of incipient conflict between local practices and the demands of the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, subsequent to ratification, Congress approved new state constitutions from the reconstructed states that contained provisions that conflicted with the federal Bill of Rights.

The other substantive conception of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is that it secures a bundle of natural rights of property and liberty, rights possessed by people in the abstract state of nature prior to their voluntary cession of some of these rights to secure the order and stability afforded by government. This reading is based primarily on the fact that, at the time the Privileges or Immunities Clause was proposed and ratified, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, which requires states to afford the citizens of other states the same privileges and immunities they extend to their own citizens, had been read in a dictum by Justice Bushrod Washington as securing "those privileges and immunities which are, in their nature, fundamental; which belong, of right, to the citizens of all free governments; and which have, at all times, been enjoyed by the citizens of the several states...from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign." Corfield v. Coryell (1823). Justice Washington had summarized those rights as "[p]rotection by the government; the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety; subject nevertheless to such restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole." This reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is consistent with the framers' concern, manifested in the 1866 Civil Rights Act, to secure important fundamental rights for all citizens on a racially nondiscriminatory basis, but this reading goes well beyond that immediate objective by suggesting that states lack the power to enact laws that offend the fundamental rights identified by Justice Washington. This view was echoed most forcefully by Justice Stephen J. Field in his dissent to the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), and, to a lesser extent, by Justice Joseph P. Bradley in his dissent to the same decision. For these two Justices, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV contained substantive protections that were carried over into the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (See Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1.)

The clause was effectively stripped of any meaningful substance by the Supreme Court's decision in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873). The majority concluded that the privileges or immunities of national citizenship were, indeed, substantive, but that they consisted of rights "which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws." The Court offered examples of these rights: the right "to come to the seat of government,...the right of free access to its seaports,...to the subtreasuries, land offices, and courts of justice in the several States...to demand the care and protection of the Federal government...when on the high seas or within the jurisdiction of a foreign government,...to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus,...[t]he right to use the navigable waters, [and the right to] become a Citizen of any State of the Union by a bona fide residence therein, with the same rights as other citizens of that State."

Notably absent from these distinctively national rights were the fundamental natural rights identified by Justice Washington in Corfield v. Coryell, despite the Court's reference to the case, and also absent, despite the Court's reference to the Constitution, the rights secured by the Bill of Rights. The Court found it unthinkable that the Privileges or Immunities Clause could have been intended "to transfer the security and protection of...civil rights... from the States to the Federal government," or "to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States." Such a change, said the Court, "would constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States," and "[w]e are convinced that no such results were intended."

After Slaughter-House, the Privileges or Immunities Clause became a virtual dead letter. The equality function of the clause, much altered in character, was assumed by the Equal Protection Clause, and the substantive functions, again altered, were assumed by the Due Process Clause. Both of these clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to "persons," whereas the Privileges or Immunities Clause is limited to "citizens." Indeed, except for Colgate v. Harvey (1935), overruled five years later in Madden v. Commonwealth of Kentucky (1940), the Supreme Court did not rely on that clause as the basis for any decision until 1999, when it decided Saenz v. Roe (1999). In Saenz, the Court struck down a California law that set welfare benefits for new residents and citizens of California at the level provided by their former state for the first year of their California residency. The Court concluded that one aspect of the right of travel, the right of new state citizens "to be treated like other citizens of that State," is one of the privileges or immunities of national citizenship.
__________________
Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
sendpm.gif Reply With Quote
Sponsored Links
  #2  
Old 08-05-2017, 04:38 PM
Boats's Avatar
Boats Boats is offline
Senior Member
 

Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Sauk Village, IL
Posts: 21,784
Arrow

High Crimes and Misdemeanors (Interesting reading_
RE: http://www.crf-usa.org/impeachment/h...demeanors.html

High Crimes and Misdemeanors, a reading on the meaning of this strange phrase that is the grounds for most impeachments and an activity in which students determine the outcome of hypothetical impeachment proceedings.

The U.S. Constitution provides impeachment as the method for removing the president, vice president, federal judges, and other federal officials from office. The impeachment process begins in the House of Representatives and follows these steps:

The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings and, if necessary, prepares articles of impeachment. These are the charges against the official.
If a majority of the committee votes to approve the articles, the whole House debates and votes on them.
If a majority of the House votes to impeach the official on any article, then the official must then stand trial in the Senate.
For the official to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict the official. Upon conviction, the official is automatically removed from office and, if the Senate so decides, may be forbidden from holding governmental office again.
The impeachment process is political in nature, not criminal. Congress has no power to impose criminal penalties on impeached officials. But criminal courts may try and punish officials if they have committed crimes.

The Constitution sets specific grounds for impeachment. They are “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” To be impeached and removed from office, the House and Senate must find that the official committed one of these acts.

The Constitution defines treason in Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Constitution does not define bribery. It is a crime that has long existed in English and American common law. It takes place when a person gives an official money or gifts to influence the official’s behavior in office. For example, if defendant Smith pays federal Judge Jones $10,000 to find Smith not guilty, the crime of bribery has occurred.

Prior to the Clinton investigation, the House had begun impeachment proceedings against only 17 officials —one U.S. senator, two presidents, one cabinet member, and 13 federal judges. Two of the17 resigned from office before the House voted to impeach.

Of the 15 impeached, the Senate voted to convict only seven — all were federal judges. The Senate dropped the case against the senator, ruling that a senator could not be impeached. One judge resigned from office before the Senate voted on his case. The Senate voted to acquit the other six officials.

In all the articles of impeachment that the House has drawn, no official has been charged with treason. (The closest to a charge of treason was one federal judge who was impeached and convicted for siding with the South and taking a position as a Confederate judge during the Civil War.) Two officials have been charged with bribery. The remaining charges against all the other officials fall under the category of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

What are “high crimes and misdemeanors”? On first hearing this phrase, many people probably think that it is just an 18th century way of saying “felonies and misdemeanors.” Felonies are major crimes and misdemeanors are lesser crimes. If this interpretation were correct, “high crimes and misdemeanors” would simply mean any crime. But this interpretation is mistaken.

The Origins of the Phrase

To better understand the meaning of the phrase, it’s important to examine how the framers of the Constitution came to adopt it. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the framers wanted to create a stronger central government than what existed under the Articles of Confederation. Adopted following the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation provided for a loose organization of the states. The framers wanted a stronger federal government, but not one too strong. To achieve the right balance, the framers divided the powers of the new government into three branches—the executive, legislative, and judicial. This is known as the separation of powers. They also gave each branch ways to check the power of the other branches. For example, although Congress (the legislative branch) makes laws, the president (the executive) can veto proposed laws. This complex system is known as checks and balances.

Impeachment of judges and executive officials by Congress was one of the checks proposed at the Constitutional Convention. The impeachment of judges drew widespread support, because federal judges would hold lifetime appointments and needed some check on their power. But some framers opposed impeachment of executive officials, arguing that the president’s power could be checked every four years by elections.

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.

With the convention agreed on the necessity of impeachment, it next had to agree on the grounds. One committee proposed the grounds be “treason, bribery, and corruption.” Another committee was selected to deal with matters not yet decided. This committee deleted corruption and left “treason or bribery” as the grounds.

But the committee’s recommendation did not satisfy everyone. George Mason of Virginia proposed adding “maladministration.” He thought that treason and bribery did not cover all the harm that a president might do. He pointed to the English case of Warren Hastings, whose impeachment trial was then being heard in London. Hastings, the first Governor General of Bengal in India, was accused of corruption and treating the Indian people brutally.

Madison objected to “maladministration.” He thought this term was so vague that it would threaten the separation of powers. Congress could remove any president it disagreed with on grounds of “maladministration.” This would give Congress complete power over the executive.

Mason abandoned “maladministration” and proposed “high crimes and misdemeanors against the state.” The convention adopted Mason’s proposal, but dropped “against the state.” The final version, which appears in the Constitution, stated: “The president, vice-president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

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.

After the Constitutional Convention, the Constitution had to be ratified by the states. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote a series of essays, known as the Federalist Papers, urging support of the Constitution. In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton explained impeachment. He defined impeachable offenses as “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

For the more than 200 years since the Constitution was adopted, Congress has seriously considered impeachment only 18 times. Thirteen of these cases involved federal judges. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the House charged against these judges included being habitually drunk, showing favoritism on the bench, using judicial power unlawfully, using the office for financial gain, unlawfully punishing people for contempt of court, submitting false expense accounts, getting special deals from parties appearing before the court, bullying people in open court, filing false income tax returns, making false statements while under oath, and disclosing confidential information.

Only three of the 18 impeachment cases have involved a president — Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974, and Bill Clinton in 1998. It’s important to take a brief look at these three cases to understand how Congress has interpreted “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was the only senator from a Southern state who stayed loyal to the union during the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln, seeking to reconcile with the South, tapped Johnson, a Democrat, as his vice-presidential running mate in 1864. When Lincoln was assassinated at the war’s end in 1865, Johnson assumed the presidency. He immediately ran into trouble with the Republican-dominated Congress over Reconstruction of the South. The Radical Republicans supported military rule in the South and voting rights and redistribution of land for blacks. Johnson disagreed and favored a quick return to civilian rule. The two sides grew increasingly farther apart as Congress repeatedly passed Reconstruction legislation, Johnson vetoed it, and Congress overrode his veto. Over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed a Tenure of Office Act, which required Johnson to get permission from Congress before firing any member of the executive branch who had been approved by Congress. Johnson responded by firing the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican. His firing violated the Tenure of Office Act. But Johnson believed the act was unconstitutional. The House passed 11 articles of impeachment. Eight involved Johnson’s violations of the Tenure of Office Act. One charged him with sending orders through improper channels. Another accused him of conspiring against Congress, citing a statement he made about Congress not representing all the states. The last summarized the other 10 charges and charged him with failing to enforce the Reconstruction Acts. At the end of the Senate trial, only three charges were brought to a vote. Johnson was saved from conviction on each by one vote.

History has not judged well those who brought the charges against Johnson. The charges are generally seen as politically motivated, based on the extreme disagreement over Reconstruction between Congress and the president. They are not viewed as “high crimes and misdemeanors” worthy of removing a president from office. Most commentators look on this impeachment as a severe threat to the separation of powers.

Richard Nixon

The next presidential impeachment case did not arise for more than 100 years. Before taking a look at the Nixon impeachment case, it’s worth examining a famous comment made a few years before (in 1970) by then-Congressman Gerald Ford, who would later succeed Richard Nixon as president. For years, Ford had urged the House to impeach a liberal justice on the Supreme Court. Although Ford’s attempts failed, he uttered memorable words about “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He stated that “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Ford argued that “there are few fixed principles among the handful of precedents.” In one sense, Ford is right. If the House votes articles of impeachment, the vote cannot be challenged in court. The Constitution gives the House sole authority over impeachment. So if the House votes articles of impeachment for any reason, the official is impeached and must stand trial in the Senate. But in another sense, Ford is clearly wrong. The framers of the Constitution did not give Congress absolute power to remove judges and executive officials. It wanted Congress to use its impeachment power only in extreme circumstances, when an official had committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The separation of powers depends on Congress limiting impeachments to these cases.

In 1972, Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection to a second term as president. During the election, burglars, with links to the White House, had been caught breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The burglary drew little press attention at the time. But it would lead to events that ultimately brought down the president. Nixon may or may not have had advance knowledge of the burglary. He probably feared, however, that its investigation might uncover evidence of political spying and the illegal use of campaign funds on the part of his administration. So he took an active role in obstructing the investigation. He discussed raising hush money for the burglars and enlisted the FBI and CIA in squelching the investigation. In 1974, the House Judiciary committee voted three articles of impeachment. One accused Nixon of obstruction of justice. Another accused him of abuse of power. The third charged him with contempt of Congress for defying the committee’s requests to produce documents. Nixon resigned the presidency before the whole House voted on the articles.

The committee had declined to vote an article of impeachment against Nixon for tax evasion. The committee did not believe this was an impeachable offense. It based its conclusion on a staff report, “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment,” which the committee had ordered prepared before beginning its investigation. This report traced the history, precedents, and grounds for impeachment. The report concluded:

Not all presidential misconduct is sufficient to constitute grounds for impeachment. . . . Because impeachment of a President is a grave step for the nation, it is predicated only upon conduct seriously incompatible with either the constitutional form and principles of our government or the proper performance of constitutional duties of the presidential office.
The same year Yale Law School professor Charles L. Black published a highly influential book, Impeachment: A Handbook. Black agreed that impeachment is a grave step that should be taken most cautiously. Impeaching a president overturns an election. Black’s research led him to the conclusion that a president should be impeached only for “serious assaults on the integrity of the processes of government,” or for “such crimes as would so stain a president as to make his continuance in office dangerous to public order.”

Black’s book cited two examples of presidential misconduct that would not merit impeachment: (1) a president brings a female minor across a state line for “immoral purposes” in violation of federal law and (2) a president obstructs justice by helping hide marijuana for a White House intern. Black considered it “preposterous” to impeach a president for these acts. These examples would prove relevant to President Clinton’s impeachment case more than 20 years later.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and reelected in 1996. During his first term, an independent counsel was appointed to investigate Whitewater, an Arkansas land deal involving Clinton that had taken place about 20 years previously. The counsel’s investigation later expanded to include scandals surrounding the firing of White House staff in its travel office, the misuse of FBI files, and an illicit affair that the president had with a White House intern. In 1998, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr issued a report to the House Judiciary Committee. It found 11 possible impeachable offenses, all related to the intern scandal. Based on the independent counsel’s investigation, the House Judiciary Committee voted four articles of impeachment. The first article accused the president of committing perjury before a grand jury convened by the independent counsel. The second charged him with providing “perjurious, false and misleading testimony” in a civil case related to the scandal. The third accused him of obstructing justice to “delay, impede, cover up and conceal the existence” of evidence related to the scandal. The fourth charged that he misused and abused his office by deceiving the American public, misleading his cabinet and other employees so that they would mislead the public, asserting executive privilege to hinder the investigation, and refusing to respond to the committee and misleading the committee about the scandal.

During the Judiciary Committee’s hearings, experts testified on what constituted “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The experts called by the Democrats argued that none of the allegations against the president rose to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” These experts echoed the reasoning found in the 1974 staff report and Professor Charles Black’s book on impeachment.

The experts called by the Republicans disagreed. They pointed out that federal judges had been removed from office for perjury. They further argued that the president had taken an oath to uphold all the laws and he had violated his duties as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
__________________
Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
sendpm.gif Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is On

All times are GMT -7. The time now is 02:12 PM.


Powered by vBulletin, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.