Amid new impeachment talk, eloquent words from the past
Newly installed House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, in his first interviews, outlined his priorities and one of them was pushing forward the impeachment inquiry into President Biden, suggesting it was time for the House to subpoena the president's son Hunter.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that perhaps is overdue," said Johnson. "We're moving forward on this very aggressively."
I could not help but think of the wise words of the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordon, a Texas Democrat, in the early stages of the Watergate hearings. One can still hear her powerful voice addressing the House committee:
"I suggest it is a misreading of the Constitution for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the President should be removed from office.
"The constitution doesn't say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of the body, the Legislature, against and upon the encroachments of the Executive. The division between the two branches of the Legislature, the House and the Senate, assigned to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge. The framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person.
"We know the nature of impeachment. ... It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account. It is designed to bridle the Executive if he engages in excesses. ... The framers confided in the Congress the power if need be to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a president swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the Executive.
"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. ... The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind the impeachment, but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the Constitutional term high crimes 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.' Common sense would be revolted if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons.
"Congress has a lot to do, appropriations, tax reform, health insurance, campaign finance reform, housing, environmental protection, energy sufficiency, mass transportation. Pettiness cannot be allowed to stand in the face of such overwhelming problems."
Perhaps the "desperate times" the new speaker is alluding to is that Republicans - despite exhaustive efforts and a great deal of innuendo - have not found a shred of evidence that the president did something wrong.
Does the president have a wayward son? Yes. Has Hunter Biden committed criminal offenses? That's for the courts to decide. Did he trade on his family name? Obviously. However, where is the link to the president? Nonetheless, the GOP House will accuse. We know already what the Senate's judgment will be.
The nakedly political House inquiry has one obvious mission - to tarnish President Biden in the run-up to the coming election and to create some sort of moral equivalency between the President and the twice-impeached Donald Trump. Congress does have a lot to do. Thus, pettiness does not begin to describe this sorry exercise.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.