Sacrificing principles for expediency.

Hmmm. RealClearPolitics is on fire. Another excellent piece from Trump's True Crime: He Made People Laugh at Congress by Frank Miele.

I empathize with the sentiment but am not wholly convinced. However, it is a clear and well-structured argument which introduces new facts and a new perspective to an otherwise tiresome debate over impeachment.

If there were any doubt that the House of Representatives in 1868 was engaged in a strictly political persecution of a president they hated, consider the language of impeachment Article 10, which argued:

“That said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches of the Government of the United States … did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and the legislative power thereof, which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain, and to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted…”

In other words, Johnson was a boor who had the temerity to speak ill of Congress! This reveals the low bar of impeachment when it is wielded as a weapon and it is an echo of what truly annoys Nancy Pelosi about our lowbrow president. How easy to substitute Donald Trump’s name before the claim that “he did bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States.”

No doubt members of Congress don’t like to have their noses tweaked, but what they should remember is that the president (either Johnson or Trump) is usually doing it on behalf of us, the American people. Indeed, the last part of Article 10 brings to my mind a picture of Speaker Pelosi scowling as she watches Trump tickle the crowd at one of his MAGA rallies with his schtick about “Pencil-neck Schiff,” “Nervous Nancy” and the Do-Nothing Congress. You really would be forgiven for thinking that Johnson was an avatar of Trump, based on this further description of the 1868 bill of particulars against the president:

“... in pursuance of his said design and intent, openly and publicly and before divers assemblages of citizens of the United States, convened in divers parts thereof ... [Johnson] did … on divers ... days and times … make and declare, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing.”

There were other articles of impeachment as well — 11 in all — but none rose to any level of true seriousness. In the end, the Senate only voted on three of the charges, and Johnson narrowly escaped conviction despite the Senate being heavily dominated by Republicans. It was to seven of them who could not be bullied into submission that Democrat Johnson owed his survival. They put country ahead of politics.

Interesting. Andrew Johnson was not an especially sympathetic figure and is easy to dislike on many grounds, but impeachment centers us on the reality that we are talking about institutions that need to be defended rather than individual politicians. Johnson was a hardly defensible president but the institutions of the federal republic, due process, constitutionalism, etc. shouldn't have been ransacked and irresponsibly manipulated simply in pursuit of an expedient end.