The Demand for Impeachment

Which is long past due

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

The political emergency in the United States has become so extreme that one doesn’t know where to begin. This is the greatest political emergency this country has faced since the Civil War. That is not hyperbole. It is a statement of fact that the historical record will confirm, and that anyone willing to look at what is happening without the anesthetic of normalcy bias can see clearly right now.

While you read this, an unconstitutional war is being waged in your name. Three American service members are dead. At least 115 children — girls, at an elementary school in southern Iran — were killed in a strike on Saturday. The head of Iran’s Red Crescent said he had not seen anything like it even during the Iran-Iraq War. The president, asked about the fallen Americans as he returned to Washington Sunday night, walked past the press corps to admire newly installed statues of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and called them “unbelievable.”

He is correct. They are unbelievable to him. He has no idea what they built or what it cost them or what they would think of what is being done in their name tonight.

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This is an illegal war. Any basic reading of the Constitution establishes this. Any cursory examination of the Founders’ intent on the nature of executive power and its limits will quickly confirm that they were absolutely opposed to the notion that an executive could wage war by fiat. The Commander-in-Chief clause grants the president authority over the conduct of war — not the authority to start one. That power belongs to Congress. This was not an accident. It was the most deliberate architectural decision the Founders made, born from their intimate knowledge of what kings do when war-making is concentrated in a single pair of hands.

The foreign policy establishment — of both parties, let us be honest — has muddied this water for decades by pointing to the War Powers Resolution of 1973 as though it resolves the question. It does not. The Resolution permits the president to commit forces for sixty days in response to a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories, or its armed forces. To argue that a war of choice against a sovereign nation falls into this category is facially ridiculous on even the most tortured reading of the statute. There was no attack on the United States. There was no imminent threat requiring immediate executive action. There was a decision, made unilaterally, to launch one of the largest military operations in a generation — more than two thousand targets struck, the supreme leader of a nation assassinated, a region set ablaze — without a single vote in Congress.

This is a constitutional crime of the gravest variety. It demands, according to the very Founders whose statues now decorate the Rose Garden, that Congress act at once.

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The political consultants will tell you that impeachment is a laughable proposition because Republicans control both chambers. They will tell you that conviction in the Senate is impossible, that right-wing media will successfully cast any impeachment effort as political theater, that the better strategy is to wait, to build a majority, to fight the next election. They will tell you, in the language of strategic patience, that the moment is not right.

The moment is always not right, according to the people whose careers depend on nothing being done.

Here is what the Democratic leadership — elected and aspiring — should be doing right now, today, if they have any sense of the moment and any basic courage to meet it:

They should demand, publicly and without qualification, the impeachment of the president, the vice president, and the entire cabinet. And they should announce that they will participate in no other business in either chamber — no votes, no hearings, no routine legislation — that is not directly related to impeachment proceedings.

And they should explain to the American public, in plain English, why. Because the president is waging an unconstitutional war. Because this administration has ignored dozens of federal court orders over the past year. Because it is engaged in an active cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, flagrantly violating the statute that requires release of those documents. Because people are being killed. Because the law is being broken at every level, continuously, openly, and without consequence.

This is a criminal regime. The remedy prescribed by the Constitution for a criminal regime is removal from office. The fact that removal is procedurally difficult does not dissolve the moral and constitutional obligation to demand it. A Democratic caucus that cannot bring itself to say this plainly — that retreats instead into War Powers Resolution votes that their own members won’t support, that calibrates its language to protect individual members’ electoral positioning while a war burns without authorization and children die in the rubble of a girls’ school — is a caucus that has failed the moment.

The oath they took was not to their careers, contrary to popular belief.

The Founders understood that the guardrail only works if someone is willing to stand at it. You do not wait for the math to be favorable. You stand at the line and you say: this is the line. You say it in public. You say it without apology. You make the other side vote against it on the record, so that history knows exactly who was where when the republic was in the balance.

A fair reading of the Oath of Office that these people have taken might lead one to conclude that this posture is the minimum position that a Member of the House or the Senate would take, given these facts. It therefore likely rests on the People to remind them of their job.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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