Justin Amash is Wrong: Impeachment Would Damage Our Democracy

Even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tries to put talk of impeachment on the back burner, Justin Amash has become the first Republican congressman to call for Donald Trump to be removed from office. This weekend on Twitter, as the Founders intended, Amash wrote, “Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”

Amash goes on to claim that impeachment requires merely that “an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.”

Of course, tweets are not Articles of Impeachment, Mueller’s Report does not indict Trump for obstruction and does not state that the reason for not indicting Trump is because he is president, and the Constitution does not include “careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct” as grounds for presidential removal.

People may not like them, but those are the starting and ending points on impeachment. Simply repeating an alternate version of reality cannot change things. So maybe this is little more than grandstanding by Amash.

But alongside Amash’s tweets are dozens of similar bleats from politicians and the media. Trump’s detractors gloat that impeachment isn’t a judicial process but a “political” one. By that they mean that less rigorous standards apply (Amash has stated that there is no obligation to show even probable cause that a crime was committed in order to impeach) and somehow that’s a good thing. Many express near-joy that the constitutional requirement for impeachment, “high crimes and misdemeanors,” isn’t defined in the law and so can be anything a partisan House wants it to be. Somehow that’s good for the democracy they otherwise see as under threat.

What the calls for impeachment have in volume they lack in specifics. Most simply refer back to Mueller’s didn’t-reach-indictment non-conclusions and leave it there, as though the Report says something clearly that it does not say obliquely. The worst of these ramblings cite Hamilton. What they all do, from Amash to Trevor Noah, is rely on assumed agreement with their audience that Trump is guilty—of something, though they’re not entirely clear what.