And Away We Go

Last night:

Charlottesville 12-17-19 at about 6pm pic.twitter.com/LiKyD9m8vG

— e'Ville Mike (@eVilleMike) December 18, 2019

So...

MERRY IMPEACHMENT

...or...

HAPPY CHECKS-N-BALANCES

Whichever turns your crank - I don't wanna offend anybody.

How It Usually Goes

Trump:
"It was the perfect crime." Sondland:
"We were all in on the crime." Mulvaney:
"We're all committing crimes all the time - get over it!" Giuliani:
"We're still criming. Try to stop us - I dare you." Chuck Todd:
"How will the Democrats be punished for solving the crime and bringing the criminals to justice?"

Editorials

This, of course, will be spun at DumFux news as proof of how evil and corrupt the Lugenpresse is.

And, just as of course-y, the Press Poodles are likely to be in perfect chorus as they fill their air time with "Are these editorial boards playing right into the hands of Trump's GOP?"

via Business Insider:

The Los Angeles Times:
"The evidence produced over the last two months is more than sufficient to persuade us that he should be impeached ... Trump flagrantly abused the power of his office."

The Boston Globe:
"The question before the country now is whether President Trump's misconduct is severe enough that Congress should exercise that impeachment power, less than a year before the 2020 election. The results of the House Intelligence Committee inquiry, released to the public on Tuesday, make clear that the answer is an urgent yes."

The New York Daily News:
"The House Intelligence Committee presents a coherent and compelling case for impeachment ... There may be no single, smoking gun, but there's ample acrid black stuff rising from the White House."

The Chicago Sun-Times:
"The president compromised our nation's best interests for pure political self-profit, as baldly as a Chicago alderman holding up a zoning change for a bribe. Trump has brought impeachment upon himself."

FiveThirtyEight is running a piece on the polling, tracking the growth in numbers of respondents who are being persuaded:

Today's Burn

In a tweet from Andrew Wortman - @AmoneyResists

Matt Gaetz rambled on with a smarmy tale about Hunter Biden's trouble in the past with a rental car company because they supposedly found a crack pipe in the car he returned - or some such - I dunno.

Here comes Hank Johnson (GA) with a bitch slap that puts Mr Gaetz's face all the way around to the other side of his fool head.

.@RepHankJohnson replies to @mattgaetz: “I don’t think the pot calling the kettle black is something we should do. I don’t know if any members on this committee have had problems with substances or DUI’s, but if I did I wouldn’t raise it.”

THIS IS AMAZINGpic.twitter.com/fzYKK87XTk

— Andrew Wortman (@AmoneyResists) December 12, 2019

To Put It Simply

From the House Intelligence Committee's report on their investigation of 45*:

Like ol' Doc Maddow said: All you have to do is look at the heading at the top of each part of Section 1.

• The President’s Request for a Political Favor 
• The President Removed Anti-Corruption Champion Ambassador Yovanovitch 
• The President’s Hand-Picked Agents Began the Scheme 
• The President Froze Vital Military Assistance 
• The President Conditioned a White House Meeting on Investigations 
• The President’s Agents Pursued a “Drug Deal” 
• The President Pressed President Zelensky to Do a Political Favor 
• The President’s Representatives Ratcheted up Pressure on the Ukrainian President 
• Ukrainians Inquired about the President’s Hold on Security Assistance 
• The President’s Security Assistance Hold Became Public 
• The President’s Scheme Unraveled 
• The President’s Chief of Staff Confirmed Aid was Conditioned on Investigations

45* knew what he was doing was illegal. He made sure to couch everything he said on the July 25 phone call in the kind of coded language that clouds the meaning of the words for anyone outside looking in, while allowing the target listener to get the message loud and clear.

And it's no stretch at all to surmise that one of Rudy's errands in Kiyv was to pre-interpret what Zelensky would hear so there'd be no misunderstanding between the two men, while maintaining plausible deniability of a quid pro quo.

Repubs love to scramble the timeline and to fuzzy up the Ukrainian names, knowing we don't pay enough attention to keep any of it straight.

So they know they can float some bullshit like "POTUS was only trying to get a handle on the history of Ukrainian corruption blah blah blah" - and we won't notice (eg) when they say Biden wanted the Ukrainian AG fired because he was investigating Hunter's bogus involvement in Barisma, when the truth is that the crooked AG was fired and that meant a new (more honest) guy came in to vet and investigate Barisma, and the new guy cleared the deal.

There's still a potential problem with Hunter Biden and how maybe his seat on the board constituted a conflict, but remember, Obama's ethics guys were voracious about making sure there was as little problem as possible. 8 years - no real scandals - no indictments - no pleas - no prison time.

Anyway, to make it even simpler:

A Short One

Rocky Mountain Mike - I'd Really Love Impeachment Tonight

Not For Nothing - I Hope

It would be nice if we could put this part of it to bed now.

WaPo - 11-22-2019:

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, while at the same time criticizing the bureau for systemic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.

The much-anticipated report due out Dec. 9 from Inspector General Michael Horowitz will allege that a low-level FBI lawyer inappropriately altered a document that was used during the process to renew a controversial warrant for electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, the officials said. The inspector general referred that finding to U.S. Attorney John Durham, and the lawyer involved is being investigated criminally for possibly making a false statement, they said.

But Horowitz will conclude that the application still had a proper legal and factual basis, and, more broadly, that FBI officials did not act improperly in opening the Russia investigation, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive report.

Another Strong Close

Adam Schiff, Chair, House Intelligence Committee

We'll see what we see, but I still won't get my hopes up too high.

Republicans aren't coming around - not yet - not publicly. And the conventional wisdom is that they won't cut 45* loose until the political cost of staying with him becomes too great and too obvious for them to bear. Duh.

Our government is degenerate.

It's a little weird to think that way about the US. There's always an element of Daddy State philosophy in government. And always there are people who believe government is there to force us all into a particular way of thinking - not just the basics of knowing our rights and respecting each other's rights, but to use the full weight of the threat of deadly force to make people conform to the arbitrary musings of doctrinaires rather than trying to nail down a few guiding principles that give us a chance to live up to our stated goal of forming a more perfect union.

The good news is that I think we're starting to bend history's arc back towards justice.

The bad news is that we haven't passed thru this very dangerous crossroads yet.

And just to continue this little metaphor mashup - when you're going through hell, keep going.

Yeah, About That

So, back in 2012, there was quite an effort to revamp and re-brand the GOP. They realized they were perceived as not being down with the good folks of the "Real America" - that the Romney campaign had boomeranged away from McCain's "Just folks and Straight Talk" bullshit, and had shown the party as catering to the elite, with Willard's dumbass "gaffe" of the 47% being the perfect illustration of how badly out of touch Republicans had become.

So they embarked on the project to re-connect with the good people - the workin' guy - the common clay of the heartland. You know - the rubes.

It's not turning out quite the way they said they wanted it to turn out. Which is not to say it's not turning out the way somebody intended it, but that's another foil hat rant for another time.

Let's just say they're -

G.utless
O.bsequious
P.honies

- and let that suffice for now. 

Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

When listening to President Trump and fellow Republicans throw around accusations against Democrats and the media or advance defenses for Trump’s impeachable conduct, there is a better than even chance they are misleading if not downright lying. In some cases, we discover the lies because other individuals are caught lying.

Roger Stone was convicted, among other things, of lying to Congress about his conversations with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. He falsely claimed: He had no emails, documents or texts relating to WikiLeaks; he never sought damaging information (i.e., emails) about Hillary Clinton; never contacted WikiLeaks through intermediaries; and never contacted the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. The last lie — denying contacts with the Trump campaign — raises the question as to whether President Trump lied in responses to Robert S. Mueller II.

At the trial we learned about Stone’s numerous contacts with the campaign:

Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, testified Tuesday that Stone began discussing Clinton leaks with the campaign in April 2016 and that from May onward Gates understood Stone to be the campaign’s intermediary with WikiLeaks. By July 2016, Gates testified, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said he was updating Trump and others regularly and directed Gates to keep following up with Stone. After Trump ended one phone call from Stone at the end of that month, Gates testified, the future president said to Gates that “more information would be coming.”

In his written answers, however, Trump claimed he had “no recollection” of conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks nor did he recall knowing Stone had discussed WikiLeaks’s email drops with the campaign. Perhaps Trump’s memory is addled; if not, it appears he lied to Mueller.

For most of us, it's not hard to see the truth about the GOP's long slide into the shit pile of distilled concentrated hatred.

But it's also pretty easy to see how, for some, it seems like it all happened suddenly.

It didn't.

I'll say this again: Trump has not remade the GOP in his own image. He's the near-perfect reflection of what the Republican Party has been morphing into for at least 30 years.

Ms Rubin is pointing out just one of the main aspects of a political party that's been trying so hard to hang onto the fantasy of some glorious past that it's lost touch with reality altogether.

And it's gotten to the point where it seems like they have to lie about everything. As if all they can do now is try to reinforce one lie with another - to cover up, or to compensate for one lie with the next.

Likewise, in the Ukraine matter multiple witnesses gave testimony that suggests that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has been telling falsehoods under oath. Some he has remedied, such as his initial statement that he had not communicated to the Ukrainians that military aid was dependent upon their opening an investigation into the Bidens. However, we now know from at least one other witness that Sondland’s denial that he spoke to the president or to the State Department was false. (He spoke to both.) One wonders if he’ll share a similar fate as Stone, the former Trump confidant who this week was found guilty on charges of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

The Trump lies relating to Ukraine are numerous and serious, although not delivered under oath. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has documented 45 Trump lies concerning Ukraine including:

Trump did not ask [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky for anything on the call. (Trump asked Zelensky to look into former Vice President Joe Biden, look into a debunked conspiracy theory about Democratic computer servers, and speak with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr.)

Zelensky criticized former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch “out of the blue” on the call. (Trump brought up Yovanovitch first.) . . . .

The whistleblower was “sooo wrong.” (The rough transcript and witness testimony have proven the whistleblower to have been highly accurate.) . . .

Schiff might have been the whistleblower’s source. (This is nonsense. The whistleblower said in the complaint that information about the call came from “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call.”)

Other Trump lies include his denial that United States military aid was held up, his bizarre accusations that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was the whistleblower’s source and his unfounded allegations that former vice president Joe Biden “stole” millions of dollars from foreign countries and pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor when Hunter Biden was still under investigation.

House Republicans continually traffic in lies — e.g., Ukraine interfered with our election, Joe Biden’s conduct pressuring removal of a delinquent prosecutor was illegal or corrupt, Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s corruption in general.

The good news is that Dems keep turning out and voting down the candidates who Trump is working very hard to prop up.

The bad news is that lots of Repubs are still in charge of some very important places, and they continue to ramp up their attempts to scotch the elections.

And I think it's a very safe bet that they're still getting plenty of help from the Russians.

An Outcome

Lots of manufactured hand-wringing and concern trolling over the effects impeachment can have on electoral politics.

Let's take a quick look at what's happened before, when Republicans have gone to great lengths trying to defend and rationalize the actions of a POTUS impeached for High Crimes & Misdemeanors.

Joyce Takes 'Em Down

Joyce Vance, Time Magazine:

Many people have become numb to this Administration’s wrongdoing after almost three years of constant scandal. Some feel that no matter what Trump does, he’ll never be held accountable. Why should they invest time in today’s awful news, when it will give way in a few days or weeks without anything changing?

This is the challenge the Democrats face as they open public impeachment hearings this week. Can they get the country to pay attention? Can they produce a coherent narrative that will help people understand this most serious of Trump Administration debacles?

- snip -

Despite what Trump has claimed repeatedly, anyone who followed the president’s directive to “read the transcript”— actually a memo of the conversation that at least one witness has told Congress excluded some pertinent information — knows that even this sanitized version of the President’s call exposes the scheme to public view. Rudy Giuliani, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Trump appointees Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland and Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker worked toward the call where Trump would tell Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor”and ask for the announcement of an investigation that everyone now knowswas about Joe Biden and his son. Trump was intent on extracting the favorbefore he would permit the purchase of American military equipment and release over $400 million in aid to Ukraine, which suffered the loss of 13,000 people in five years during the conflict with Russia, and agree to meet with Zelensky. Far from a perfect call, it was a scheme to have a foreign country intervene in our election. It was so far off the mark that when White House officials learned about it, they stashed the record of it on a highly classified server, apparently in hopes it wouldn’t come to light. You don’t have to cover up legitimate government operations.

As boring as I sound even to myself, the only way to get this to stick is to play Cult45's game - the part that has everything to do with repetition.

They keep repeating the same kinda shit, and before you know it, people start to internalize it and it becomes part of the 'norm'.

Propaganda works.

A Short Speech

Preach it, brother.

Slowly Slowly

All the "progress" being made by the Dems to bring this rogue POTUS to heel becomes so much sound and fury signifying nothing unless we all keep pushing.

And sometimes it amazes me how hard we have to push just to get people to see their way clear to do what's right, when it really should be obvious that an awful lot is wrong, and that something has to be done.

WaPo:

Republican senators are lost and adrift as the impeachment inquiry enters its second month, navigating the grave threat to President Trump largely in the dark, frustrated by the absence of a credible case to defend his conduct and anxious about the historic reckoning that likely awaits them.

Recent days have delivered the most damaging testimony yet about Trump and his advisers commandeering Ukraine policy for the president’s personal political goals, which his allies on Capitol Hill sought to undermine by storming the deposition room and condemning the inquiry as secretive and corrupt.

Those theatrics belie the deepening unease many Republicans now say they feel — particularly those in the Senate who are dreading having to weigh their conscience against their political calculations in deciding whether to convict or acquit Trump should the Democratic-controlled House impeach the president.

And there it is - the basic crux of our problems - politicians who won't follow their conscience unless it aligns with their political ambitions.

Politicians who have to borrow the courage to stand up for what's right - and stand against what's wrong - when it's perfectly clear the leader of their party is breaking the fucking law practically every fucking day.

And I'm getting pretty tired of hearing myself talk about about, but how do I not? How do I shrug it off? How do I ignore the nagging thought that the Repubs aren't doing what's clearly their duty unless what's happening is something they want to have happen?

I'll keep on indulging myself in this little exercise in Argument From Ignorance until someone points to something else that makes sense to me:

The Republican Party is a front - a mask - a beard - it's providing cover for a concerted effort to tear down our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

Yeah - About That

Steny Hoyer, Democrat, House Majority Leader, on MSNBC:

"The rules we are following for the depositions were written by Mike Pompeo and Trey Gowdy, Republicans. 

47 Republicans are on the 3 committees the GOP is complaining they can’t attend. They’re already here. They've already heard 65 hours of testimony."

Beau Explains

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Thank The Cosmic Muffin

...for Laurence Tribe

If 30 of the 53 Republican Senators were to boycott the final Senate vote on whether or not to convict and remove 45* from the presidency, then “two-thirds of the Senators present” would equal 47, the exact number of Democratic Senators.

Enough to convict.

And it's just possible those 47 would be joined by a dozen Republican Senators who somehow manage to find their balls by then.

Ben Wofford, Washingtonian

A nugget of political arithmetic is suddenly everywhere: “Two-thirds majority.” This is the share of votes required to convict President Trump in an impeachment trial in the United States Senate. That’s 67 senators, if you’re counting—or, in the glass-half-empty variation, the number of Republican senators required to jump ship is 20.

Mostly, these numbers are used to cast doubtful sentiments on the prospect of impeachment. As CNN correspondent Manu Raju reports, convicting Trump “would require support from a two-thirds majority of the Senate—a highly unlikely proposition.”

- snip -

Not so fast.

The Constitution doesn’t indicate that removal from office requires two-thirds of the Senate. It requires two-thirds of senators present for the proceedings.

The inclusion of this single word in the Constitution’s impeachment clauses shifts the mathematical ledger of how impeachment, however unlikely, could go down. It allows for the all-important two-thirds threshold to exist along a sliding scale—far from the full attendance of the 100-member Senate. In theory, a vote to convict the President (or anyone else) would count as legal with as few as 34 members, not 67, assuming the absolute minimum (51) participated.

“The Constitution contains quorum requirements [elsewhere] and clearly distinguishes between percentages of a particular chamber and percentages of ‘members present,'” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. “That language in the provision for Senate conviction on impeachment charges is quite deliberate, creating precisely the possibility” described above.

The Senate’s formal rules on impeachment, last updated in 1986, repeat the Constitution’s “present” provision numerous times.

“It’s a sliding scale,” says Alan Frumin, the former Parliamentarian of the Senate who now holds emeritus status. “In other words, it’s not an absolute two-thirds, it’s two-thirds of some number. And there you get to the question of the denominator.”

So what we watch for is a signal that Senators are planning to boycott the proceedings - and we've already heard a few (albeit on the House side) saying they'll boycott certain hearings etc. 

If they sit in, but abstain from the vote, it fucks up the arithmetic because they'd be included in the "Senators present" calculation. But if they put on a show and bluster around making like they're outraged by the whole thing and want nothing to do with it - then there's a fair shot at pulling it off.

There's something poetic and karmic about delving into smarmspace to find a solution to Republican Smarmocracy.

Comin' Fer Ya

NYT:

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s accounting firm must turn over eight years of financial records to a House committee, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday, handing the president a significant defeat in his attempts to block the release of the returns.

The House Reform and Oversight Committee issued a subpoena earlier this year demanding that Mazars USA, the president’s accounting firm, hand over the records. Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused Democrats on the committee of conducting a witch hunt with no legitimate purpose.

On Friday, a three-judge federal panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided 2-1 with the Democrats, saying that the committee has the right to the documents.

“Contrary to the president’s arguments, the committee possesses authority under both the House Rules and the Constitution to issue the subpoena, and Mazars must comply,” the appeals court panel wrote in its opinion. Mr. Trump appointed the dissenting judge, Neomi Rao.

The ruling is a significant loss for the president, who often boasts of his wealth but has adamantly refused to release his tax returns since he began his campaign for president. His lawyers could appeal the case to the full appellate court or the Supreme Court.

“We conclude that the public record reveals legitimate legislative pursuits, not an impermissible law-enforcement purpose, behind the committee’s subpoena,” the judges wrote.

The president also suffered a defeat this week in a similar case in which the Manhattan district attorney has sought the president’s tax records from Mazars. A federal judge ruled that the accounting firm must hand over the tax records to the district attorney.

The president’s lawyers won an emergency stay of the ruling.

Some History

Sometimes I hate learning new things. Actually, I guess it's more that I kinda hate knowing some of things that I learn.

Paraphrasing Jackson Browne: I wanna be a happy idiot.

Ever wonder why 45* picked Andrew Jackson as his favorite POTUS / historical figure?

WaPo:

Even for those who are convinced that President Trump must go, the prospect of impeaching him is daunting.

In part, that’s because Trump is already calling his critics “spies” and “savages” and has warned of a civil war if the charges against him move forward. Imagine what the man will tweet if the U.S. Capitol Police ever turn up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., telling him to pack his things.

The deeper reason there is so much uncertainty around impeachment is because no sitting president has ever actually been thrown out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors. Richard Nixon resigned before Congress could decide that he was, in fact, a crook, and both Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were acquitted in their impeachment trials. Removal from office is hard to imagine because it has never happened.

Except that it has happened, to another real estate mogul turned politician with improper ties to foreign leaders. It’s just that he was a senator, not a president.

His name was William Blount, born in 1749 to a wealthy family in North Carolina, one of the most corrupt parts of British North America. In 1776, Blount joined the patriot cause as paymaster for the new state. While handling large volumes of IOUs, many of them in the form of western lands promised to soldiers, he saw firsthand how those in power could profit from their duties.

He liked what he saw.

With independence won in 1783, most people in North Carolina wanted to make western lands available for poor settlers as well as patriotic veterans. But with so many groups — the Cherokee and Creek nations, the Continental Congress, the British, the Spanish, etc. — vying for the southern frontiers, no one knew how to claim those lands. Indeed, many settlers wanted to start a new state just west of North Carolina, where no one owned too many acres and people could pay their taxes in pelts.

Blount had other ideas.

His strategy was simple: Make up the names of hundreds of settlers and then snap up the best plots with these ghost entries at North Carolina’s new land office, which opened in 1783. Then, he tried to raise land values by luring British investors with fairy tales of North America’s emerging real estate markets. “You will necessarily keep up a Report of as many [settlers] being about to go [west] as you possibly can,” he told one of his minions, “whether true or not.” There were many shady speculators in post-Revolution America, but none as audacious as Blount.

With his associates, among them a young lawyer named Andrew Jackson, Blount eventually “owned” about 1 million acres, much of it deep inside Indian country. He used these claims to gain influence with both state and federal officials. In 1790, Blount became governor of the Southwest Territory (today’s Tennessee), rejoicing to his brother that this post was “of great Importance to our Western Speculations.”

In the face of constant invasion, several hundred Cherokees declared war on the Southwest Territory on Sept. 11, 1792. For the next two years, Blount begged U.S. officials for aid, but federal authorities were focused on Ohio, prompting Blount and his confidants to privately rage that the do-gooders in the nation’s capital preferred “savage” friends to white families. So they took matters into their own hands, with Blount quietly instructing Jackson and other confidants to launch scorched-earth missions into Indian country.

Of course, the administrations of George Washington and John Adams were no friends of any Indians, but they still required U.S. citizens to abide by solemn treaties, including a new one with the Cherokee in 1794. Blount was all for peace if it would improve land values, but this treaty blocked white settlers from further trespassing on Indian grounds, which meant they could not buy Blount’s more remote claims.

The parallels are too fuckin' spooky:

Vastly in debt because of his high-flying speculations, Blount could not wait for federal officials to open more land for legal sale. So, in early 1797, he used his position as one of the first senators from Tennessee to approach British agents about invading the Spanish-held lands of the Gulf Coast. (Spain and Britain were then at war because of the French Revolution, while the United States clung to neutrality.)

They never really caught up with Blount, but they managed to drive him out of office, and he lived out his days in semi-exile in the wilds of Tennessee.

Impeachment

As is usually the case, some guys are out in front of the band catching all the panties, while others - the heart and soul of the enterprise - are relegated to backup and fill-in rolls.

That's not to say the singers and the lead guitar players aren't doing any of the work - I'm just saying we don't have our favorite band without the people we sometimes don't even see.

George Mason is the greatest Founding Father nobody ever heard of.

But anyway, the point here is that we got a very workable document out of a convention of truly extraordinary gentlemen.

Of course, there's no point in planning your work if you're not gonna work your plan.

Smithsonian Magazine, Erick Trickey:

The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was winding down, the draft of the United States’ supreme law almost finished, and George Mason, the author of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, was becoming alarmed. Over the course of the convention, the 61-year-old had come to fear the powerful new government his colleagues were creating. Mason thought the president could become a tyrant as oppressive as George III.

So on September 8, 1787, he rose to ask his fellow delegates a question of historic importance. Why, Mason asked, were treason and bribery the only grounds in the draft Constitution for impeaching the president? Treason, he warned, wouldn’t include “attempts to subvert the Constitution.”

After a sharp back-and-forth with fellow Virginian James Madison, Mason came up with another category of impeachable offenses: “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Americans have debated the meaning of this decidedly open-ended phrase ever since. But its inclusion, as well as the guidance the Founders left regarding its interpretation, offers more protection against a dangerous executive power than many realize.

- and -

...Mason, one of Virginia’s richest planters and a major framer of his home state’s new constitution, was the first delegate to argue that the government needed a check on the executive’s power. “Some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate” was necessary, he argued on June 2, without “making the Executive the mere creature of the Legislature.” After a short debate, the convention agreed to the language proposed in the Virginia Plan: the executive would “be removable on impeachment and conviction of malpractice or neglect of duty” – a broad standard that the delegates would later rewrite.

Mason, Madison, and Randolph all spoke up to defend impeachment on July 20, after Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania moved to strike it. “[If the president] should be re-elected, that will be sufficient proof of his innocence,” Morris argued. “[Impeachment] will render the Executive dependent on those who are to impeach.”

“Shall any man be above justice?” Mason asked. “Shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice?” A presidential candidate might bribe the electors to gain the presidency, Mason suggested. “Shall the man who has practiced corruption, and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment by repeating his guilt?”

Madison argued that the Constitution needed a provision “for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate.” Waiting to vote him out of office in a general election wasn’t good enough. “He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation”— embezzlement—“or oppression,” Madison warned. “He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”

Randolph agreed on both these fronts. “The Executive will have great opportunities of abusing his power,” he warned, “particularly in time of war, when the military force, and in some respects the public money, will be in his hands.” The delegates voted, 8 states to 2, to make the executive removable by impeachment.

"A republic, Madam - if you can keep it."

The Whistleblower Complaint

Take a listen.