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imagine if iT had worked.
Imagine if our President had leveraged his role as
Commander in Chief to persuade a foreign power to
open an investigation into his political opponent.
Imagine if the President’s rival lost the primary
because news broke that he was under investigation.
Imagine if that meant the President faced a weaker
candidate in November 2020—and won re-election as
a result.
Imagine if our President owed his victory to a
foreign power and we never found out.
Imagine how much influence the
leaders of that country would have on our
foreign policy decisions.
Imagine how easily they could
blackmail our Commander in Chief.
Imagine what our President would
do next, knowing he could subvert our
democracy without paying a price.
Now, imagine if, eventually, we did
find out. But it was too late—because he
had already won.
Imagine what that would do to
our faith in elections, to our trust in
government, to our belief that we live in a
democracy.
If President Trump’s efforts to coerce Ukraine into
interfering with American democracy had stayed a
secret until the 2020 election—if a whistle-blower
hadn’t spoken out—we would have fundamentally,
perhaps irrevocably, lost faith in the legitimacy of our
republic.
That is why there is no choice but to impeach and
remove Trump: because he was willing to undermine
our democracy to help his prospects of re-election;
because he has stated, unapologetically, that he would
do it again; and most important, because he wielded
the powers of his office for personal benefit instead
of for the benefit of the people. And a President like
that—a President who puts himself over his country—
is exactly the kind of Commander in Chief our
founders included impeachment in our Constitution
to remove.
Article II, Section 4, of our Constitution delineates
what offenses warrant the removal of a President:
“The President... shall be removed from office on
impeachment for... treason, bribery, or other high
crimes and misdemeanors.”
This raises the question: What, exactly, is a high
VIEWPOINT
THE CASE FOR
IMPEACHMENT
By Neal Katyal
With Sam Koppelman
crime or misdemeanor?
The answer isn’t what you’d expect. High crimes
and misdemeanors are not necessarily crimes as de-
fined by criminal codes. (After all, if the President de-
cided to nuke Canada unprovoked, that would techni-
cally be within his rights as Commander in Chief but
would nonetheless be grounds for impeachment.)
Nor do all crimes listed in criminal codes qualify as
high crimes and misdemeanors. (One of the two high
crimes enumerated by our founders, bribery, wasn’t
even in criminal codes when the Constitution was
written.)
But while our founders never explicitly defined
the term, a consensus has emerged as to what a high
crime and misdemeanor is.
As none other than Vice President Mike Pence
said in response to witness testimony in 2008, back
when he was a member of Congress: “This business of
high crimes and misdemeanors goes to the question
of whether or not the person serving as President of
the United States put their own interests... ahead of public service.” Pence’s
definition echoed Alexander Hamilton’s
characterization of an impeachable
offense as an “abuse or violation of some
public trust.”
And in his conduct related to Ukraine
alone, Trump is guilty of three such
abuses of trust.
trump’S firSt abuSe of trust is the
one our founders feared most: inviting
a foreign power to interfere with our
democracy. As George Washington
said in his farewell address: “Foreign
influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican
government.” James Madison, meanwhile, proposed
including impeachment in the Constitution for the
explicit purpose of ensuring that no President could
“betray his trust to foreign powers.”
So Trump isn’t only guilty of an impeachable
offense; his efforts to encourage Ukraine to
investigate Vice President Joe Biden constitute a
paradigmatic impeachable offense—one of the very
high crimes that impeachment was included in our
Constitution to protect against.
He’s also guilty of a second paradigmatic
impeachable offense: bribery. And all of the evidence
we need to prove Trump partook in quid pro quo
(“something for something”) exchanges is in the
edited summary of the phone call released by his own
White House—in which our Commander in Chief
offers up Javelin antitank missiles and a White House
meeting in exchange for the “favor” of Ukraine’s
opening investigations into Biden and the 2016
election.
Trump Administration officials have testified that
the President also held back $391 million in securityAll threeof thoseimpeachableoffenses boildown to onetruth