The House impeachment inquiry kicks off this morning — I’ll be part of Fox News’s coverage of the hearing, which may last all day. To repeat what I’ve said before, I think this is a strategic error by Republicans.
As many of us said during the 2019 Trump Ukraine impeachment, and as I still believe, the Framers made impeachment hard to do because they were afraid of its being used as a political weapon. An impeachment that proceeds along party lines just diminishes the force of what Madison regarded as an “indispensable” congressional check on abuse of presidential power. (I discussed this history in Faithless Execution.) Impeachment is the political equivalent of the nuclear option, and we’ll regret (if we don’t already) its being turned into something more like a partisan censure — that the target and the opposition party wear as a badge of honor and a rally/fundraising-cry.
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