Since talk of impeachment is in the air, it seems incumbent on all vocal critics of the president to go on the record with their points of view on this momentous question. So let me devote this column to explaining why I think it’s a bad idea on both policy and political grounds.

First, the policy grounds.

The power of the Congress to impeach the president is one of the most awesome powers in the Constitution. It’s also one that the Constitution describes in the vaguest of manners.

In the 1990s, congressional Republicans construed the language of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as a roving commission for the Congress to remove the president from office for any legal infraction, either in his personal or presidential capacity. But this was an abuse of the power of impeachment, not a proper use. Stringing up a president on a legal technicality over a deposition in a civil case wasn’t what the Framers had in mind when they wrote the passage into our founding document.

So why is impeachment in the Constitution?

In our constitutional system, there must be some power to remove the president from office constitutionally and nonviolently because if the holder of the office simply refuses to accept or accede to the system of checks and balances outlined in the Constitution there’s really very little the other branches can do to bring him to heel. At the extremes, the power of the purse just isn’t a tight enough leash on a runaway president.

The clearest case for impeachment is one in which the president refuses to follow the law and accede to the Congress’s and the court’s oversight powers. The only solution to such a constitutional crisis would be for the Congress to remove the president from office for violating his oath and committing political high crimes.

But that’s just not the case at the moment because Congress has made little if any effort to rein him in. So impeaching him can’t make any sense because the Congress — in the constitutionally indolent hands of the Republican majority — has made no attempt to oversee the president by constitutional means.

This isn’t the only case where impeachment might be appropriate. Another would be the case where the president has simply lost the confidence of the country in either the legitimacy of his presidency or his ability to govern. This, I think — for all its legal and constitutional particulars — is the best explanation for the attempted impeachment of Richard Nixon.

As you can probably see from what I’ve said above, I’m in the camp of those who believe that impeachment is inherently political. None of the constitutional scholars who speak of this or that crime “rising to the level” of high crimes and misdemeanors makes any sense to me. Crimes that would lead to impeachment can’t be understood outside their particular political context. Or, to put it another way, the judicial crimes that a president might commit only become impeachable because they become political crimes.

So that’s my take on what impeachment is for and why the current situation doesn’t call for it: Impeachment is for a president who won’t allow Congress or the courts to exercise their constitutional powers. But we’re not there yet because Congress hasn’t tried.

Now, to the politics.

It’s treated as a given by most Beltway Democrats that a push for impeachment is bad politics because it will take attention off the president’s abysmal record and put it on the hot-button issue of impeachment and whether Democrats should be pursuing such a policy. I’m inclined to believe it’s probably bad politics on those grounds too.

But the key reason it’s not smart politically is that it represents a grand evasion, a sort of political escapism on the part of Democrats who’ve had a very bad and dispiriting string of elections.

Winning elections on the ground in swing states is hard. Making the case to the public that President Bush is a disastrous president who should be reined in is … well, a lot harder than it should be. Winning 10 more seats in the House is hard. Impeachment, though, is easy.

It may not be easy in the sense that it’s going to happen any time soon or ever, but, conceptually, it’s easy. Easy to understand. Easy to call for. It’s moral clarity on steroids.

But people who care about politics should care about it because they care about actual politics, what actually happens, who gets votes and who doesn’t, who has the power for awesome decisions like going to war.

Critics of the president who care about those things should do the one concrete and meaningful thing they can do at the moment to have an effect on those key issues, and that is to create a counterweight in the Congress, specifically by putting Democrats in control of at least one chamber.

Once that happens, and if the Congress does its job of oversight, impeachment will still be there if the president continues his lawless ways.

Until then it’s just an indulgence.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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