Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, October 17, 2009 5:08:21 PM
Brown’s best argument for impeaching Barack Obama was his reliance
on Federalist 65 to claim that impeachment was a mechanism to express
political dissent from the executive. Unfortunately, Federalist 65 is
a philosophical, not legal, document. The language of the Constitution
is pretty clear: impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and
misdemeanors,” not political dissent. Contra Brown, the US is not set
up to be a parliamentary democracy with votes of no confidence, because the President does not derive his powers from Congress in our system
as the Prime Minister does from Parliament in those systems.
Presidents get elected by the states through popular votes in our
constitution. Congress has no jurisdiction to issue no-confidence
votes, and to arrogate that role would be a usurpation of power from
the people and the states.
The Constitution includes impeachment for Congress to remove corrupt
Presidents, and other federal officials as well. Even then, it uses a
large amount of political capital, which usually comes to the detriment
of those pursuing it, especially when the effort is seen as partisan.
Floyd Brown not only missed this, he fundamentally misrepresented the
impact of the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Brown claims that before
Clinton’s impeachment, he was pursuing a radical agenda on health care
and foreign policy, and that the impeachment left him a lame duck and
compliant to a Republican Congress. Unfortunately, he’s completely
wrong about this history. The impeachment came in 1998, long after
Clinton lost Congress to Republicans in 1994 and successfully tacked
back to the center. The impeachment effort left Republicans
on the defensive, somewhat divided, and provided enough momentum for
Democrats to keep the GOP from gaining seats in both the House and
Senate, as had been expected in the last Clinton-era midterms.