Concerning the Recent Impeachment of President Trump
“A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not to be more desired than difficult to be attained in a government wholly elected.”
(Federalist No. 65 by Alexander Hamilton)
Herein does Hamilton in Federalist No. 65 warn that the more this sought-out court is desired for its requisite need in a case of impeachment of a president, the more difficult it may be to obtain it as per its comprise – who will be the actors, the agents of such a court? Thus, the Senate is carefully chosen partly for its numerary powers – it consists of many elected officials – as well as for its judiciary power as by appointment vested by the Constitution.
“The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
(Federalist No. 65 by Alexander Hamilton)
Thus, the House of Representatives formed a case for the impeachment of President Donald Trump because in the course of his rightful conduct of foreign affairs in Ukraine he once broached the subject of the question of the investigation of former Vice President Biden. Biden had entered into a quid pro quo with an official of Ukraine. The act on the part of Trump of asking President Zelensky of Ukraine to broach an investigation of the details of Joe Biden’s deeds regarding this quid pro quo simply constitutes a point of political assessment of a nation – that of Ukraine – for its candidacy to receive foreign aid; this on the part of Trump does not constitute anything illegal. The nature of foreign policy as tempered or moderated by a sitting president is indeed political. If former Vice President Biden is as it happens also an active candidate for becoming the next president of the United states, then a certain political expediency crops up regarding the circumstances as to how he conducted himself regarding his supposed work to help eradicate corruption in the Ukraine. Had the then Vice President Biden in his character as an elected official of America upheld the public trust by demanding that Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Shokin resign his office while Shokin was conducting a trial of Burisma, a company on whose board sat Biden’s own son Hunter? Shokin was forcibly fired but only by the power of the contingency attached by Biden – that of a billion dollars in a loan for its foreign aid from the United States. Without that firing of the prosecutor investigating Burisma, Biden declared that he would withhold the offered foreign aid to Ukraine.
Simply put, the ultimatum Biden put forth was: either fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings, or else the nation of Ukraine will not receive foreign aid from the United States.
The prosecutor Shokin who was subsequently summarily fired under a stated six-hour ultimatum by Joe Biden was importantly known to be upstanding and honest, reliable to mete out a justice beyond the corruption so rampant in the Ukraine government and industry – particularly was Burisma Holdings known to be corrupt. I have read that there are other accounts of the excellence or non-excellence of Prosecutor General Shokin, yet I place trust in Rudy Giuliani who describes Shokin as living defensively now in reduced straits exactly because of his upright character when he was a prosecutor.
The task of the Senate in trying the articles of impeachment given this venerate body by the House of Representatives was therefore to discern in part which party in the political atmosphere of our nation was more of a target than the other: meaning President Trump or former Vice President Biden.
Was the former Vice President Biden in his modus operandi currently as a presidential candidate to carry the weight of his presidential candidacy as a champion of the of the public trust somehow when his political identity would be thus derived from presidential powers in foreign affairs now only SUPERIMPOSED yet not yet even won by election to office by the American people? For these supposed powers under a presumptive, yes, platform of candidacy alone should pre-empt the sitting President Trump who had been duly elected by the people?
Moreover, coupled with this odd superimposition of presidential power in foreign policy governing upon his past affairs with Ukraine, a nation ridden with corruption, it is said, was there not yet the thorny complexity in Biden’s past vice presidential role of mixing unwisely his own son in the matters of his official office of vice president at hand? His son had aligned himself through employment with the most wealthy and influential oligarch of Ukraine, Zlochevsky, thereby achieving great remuneration by that employment in Burisma Holdings, an oil and natural gas company.
Or was the sitting president of the United States, President Donald Trump, now to be targeted by an impeachment preferment by the House of Representatives because or only because the former vice president was politically vying for his office, that of the presidency?
Now in Article 65 it continues on the subject of the Senate under consideration to become the actual court for an impeachment trial as the Framers were conferring on the writing of our Constitution. Let us hear it again with a little continuation:
“A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
On January 17, 2017 the American political movement known as the Resistance was formed in a spirit of opposition to President Donald Trump. No sooner, furthermore, than Trump’s election to the presidency did Democratic leaders state openly a bounden contempt in their eyes for the outcome of the Trump versus Clinton presidential election. Alongside their contempt for Trump did many elected officials openly declare their deepest will to impeach President Trump even before he had held office and done anything in the line of his official duties. It is even said that some few of these leaders had slated Trump’s impeachment before he had taken the oath of office. To them that oath was a mere formality they should shun and ignore since Trump in their eyes’ design was no better than a sitting duck for an impeachment no matter what. Now I ask you: in light of this flagrant political polarity, how can the subsequent, most partisan impeachment of Trump ever now or in accurate history’s annals be regarded as valid? As likely to be valid it is not. Nor has there ever been such a partisan impeachment of any United States president in the history of our country.
The honorable and righteous task of the Democrats whose acerbic oppositional sentiments towards Trump would rather have been to politick, yes; but it should have been to politick in sanctified, given channels of expertise and presence on the nation’s political stage. To grasp instead the executive office by a Constitutionally constructed political attack demonstrates a profound hubris on the part of the Democrats which by dint of its ever having been attempted may even have the power and place to have ended the long-standing Democrat party we once knew. Indeed, these Democrats are afraid that they could never triumph over this astounding president, President Trump, whose record of promise-keeping to the American people who elected him has apparently totally flummoxed the Democrats, rendering them null and void as to meaningful, direct and traditional political actions to win the next presidential election. Is that the whole story, however? Sadly, the Democrats are partially stultified in their political matrix since they are in a severe conflagration within their own ranks — that of an ambivalence as to the very nature itself of our governing system. These Democrats have among their ranks rank socialists now who want to accomplish radical change in our own nation’s governing. The Green New Deal proposed by the Democrats is so quixotic, and it is precisely quixotic in my opinion since it is designed to confuse and indoctrinate the people so as to make a huge opening for an overthrow of our existing political way of governing.
In fact, the office of the president in the minds of the Framers who drafted our Constitution and took it to the people for their own consideration by the vehicle of the Federalist Papers, was carved out very carefully. That office of the presidency was provided a unitary power in the president. The power to conduct foreign affairs was assigned to the president, not to an entire array of people who might contend for the office, either. Absolutely remarkably, the direst fear in the minds of those who conceived of this republic was that the legislative branch of government would actually do what has just been done to our own President Donald Trump: impeach along party lines and sentiments largely and only. Thus our nation and its people who have voted in this sitting president, who has indeed been acquitted by the Senate vote – be it also along party lines or not – is at a unique and critical juncture in terms of the clarity of the rule of law. The defenders of the impeachment in the House and in the subsequent Senate trial have so sadly spoken essentially as according to their contemptuous hatred of our president. It was difficult to hear how these strange leaders dressed their talk with all manner of liberal language, alternating with a novel transcendental absolutism. By transcendental absolutism is meant the arrogation of loose legal grounds through willful usurpation of the separation of powers with high-sounding phrases replete with patriotic front talk drawn from a false level of ultimate perfection that is just not real and there. Most importantly, no evidence could be mustered to match their elevated vocabulary and legal swashbuckling. No crime — no high crime nor misdemeanor could be assigned the agency of President Trump. It seems that their very words were designed. They assumed a patriotic poetry, it seemed, just to hide that they knew only that a good performance could impel their sordid mission. This became a great embarrassment to the rule of law and to the people and to some of their fellow leaders. I saw it as an advertisement for something further in light of the results of the Mueller investigation that had cleared Trump from colluding with the Russians so as to gain an advantage in the presidential election over Clinton – that was a great loss to those Democrats. Those sorry Democrats have irreverently ignored the very bedrock of their own validation to hold public power, as well: that bedrock is the people, the voters. It is the people, the voters, who fundamentally ultimately have the real and rarified say in who runs the country, the government, according to classical democratic principles of a representative federal state wherein the representatives of the people in the legislature are elected by the people. The impeachers, those who would ignore the caveats just recited here of the wise founders of our nation against a dangerous partisan impeachment of a president who has been elected by the people, have openly defiled the public trust in so doing, in so pursuing a partisan impeachment of a sitting president. Theirs should have been to do their discrete jobs as legislators; instead, they have fallen short of remarkable time to be spent legislating where needed. Hearsay has it that the Democrats of Congress have put in perfunctory and minimized time legislating. They have spent their time and taxpayers’ money in coming up with a plan to target the Chief Executive of the nation. Why? It is in order to purportedly block his re-election. This initiative, this attempt to block the re-election of Donald Trump using the Constitution as some kind of a tool, really is an attempt to lower out hallowed Constitution. It amounts to only a purely sordid political bargaining stump held tightly by the wild Democrats of today so that they can reinvent our people’s circle from their inner clutch, their own insider circle, as if to ‘re-invent the wheel’ that would be the metaphorical perfection of this great nation of America as it is conceived in liberty. However, this stand on their part is not only defiant of our hallowed respect for the office of the presidency per se and of the voting power of the people to place him in office, but it also might be lesser than another future blunder of theirs if it is only viewed as what it may appear to be on the surface. What if the defense lawyers of President Trump during the impeachment trial in the Senate have truly uncovered a constant, nagging ability in the impeachers – the Speaker of the House and her chosen managers of the impeachment trial in the Senate – to defy the rule of law as per innocent until proven guilty and even deny the accused, President Trump, of his own Constitutional rights?
| “The peace of the whole,” argued Alexander Hamilton, “ought not to be left at the disposal of a part” (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 80, 1788). | |
Within the Framers’ philosophical wisdom in writing the Constitution lies their ideation that by nature governing man is jealous and at times can be irrational. Facing that reality, did the Framers’ try to design a system of governing that would find its effectiveness and longevity by profoundly accounting for the nature of man, of people who gain authority. Coupled with this concept of the fallibility of mankind, did the Framers found their design upon a conception philosophically of a cocoon that might remain as a protective inspiration for elected officials to always reflect upon even despite their political animosities, diverse answerability to their respective constituencies, and also their personal fallibilities. Indeed, such contravening factors that can understandably disrupt the harmonious doings of the active governing processes as carried out by the elected officials of the governing branches would have the power to squander their better faculties and morale; to wit, these contravening factors could pre-empt those elected officials from working for the people in a mind still duty-bound to the trust placed in them to uphold the Constitution – so help them God. The nature of this protective layer, this cocoon within which lies the truthful nugget of the foundation of a democracy as per principle, protects and preserves the individual from such leaders gone awry: for the individual is sacred by nature. This is the what lies within the visionary cocoon — the sacred individual, yes; and in contemptuous political times it becomes that the individual is sacred. Forsooth, the boundaries of such protection as afforded by belief in the individual as essentially sovereign through the laws of nature would have the power to preserve the sense of and existence of freedom and equality living in the hearts of the people. Let us reflect upon the words of the great Benjamin Franklin hereby:
“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.”
-Benjamin Franklin
May I elaborate upon that border of protection from tyranny since it is tyranny that is bred in communism nowadays; and, forsooth, is not communism merely advanced or devolved socialism that can devolve from what may be sneaked into the door of a democracy euphemistically with the term ‘democratic socialism?’ That protection is provided the individual in our American democracy such that innocence should always reflect through the rule of law; such that all individuals are innocent until proven guilty; and such that all citizens are to be afforded due process of the law – these fundamental legal precepts guard our nation’s destiny as an integral and flourishing democracy. They are built into our country’s heritage and history, ever causing or capable of causing a restoration of our best perfection possible as answerable one to the other: our Constitution to the people. If ever honor to that Constitution should stray due to catastrophic ideological clashes and cacophony, our legal scholars as evidenced recently in the brilliance of the Trump legal team in the Senate impeachment trial will naturally use a logical reductionism that starts the legal processing once again from the sacred individual whose rights are born at birth, whose rights are a writ of nature itself. Who can ever defy a president without finding that he had committed a crime and thus call him truly impeached except partisan zealots who do not allow our great president to govern from his Constitutionally granted seat of unitary power. Do they not so act in the name of politics and politics alone, using the blurring of lines founded upon the separation of powers as their dark handmaiden? This is un-American, and this is also transparent to the thinking American mind of philosophical/political wisdom. Do these congressmen want to change America beyond recognition because the people had elected an outsider to their insider circle? This is simply petty, but it is profound.
However, the Framers, knowing that events such as the partisan impeachment drama we just watched as performed by some jealous and irrational leaders in our Congress could dangerously occur, had wisely designed this protective element from first fundamentals up as according to the spirit and words of the Declaration of Independence, words that had slated the elevated framework of the very Constitution as it unfolded into script on paper:
“. . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
From the Declaration of Independence
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
The goal of the Framers was to design a government whose design would yet keep alive the spirit of freedom destined to infuse the lives of all the individuals in the great body politic – the people themselves – the ultimate sayers to whom periodically elected officials must answer. This responsible philosophical tenet of wisdom to ever preserve freedom for the individual inspired the deeper thinking of such thinkers as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. These thinkers and their associates believed firmly that the key metaphysically to a successful democracy would lie in the innate nature of the human being that was the same for everyone – that all are born free and equal with certain inalienable rights. If that truth were to be asserted and incorporated into the way of governing itself in democracy, they reasoned, then the governing few would not be able to transgress the liberties of the people since as Franklin said: nobody grants freedom; freedom is known by the nature of the individual, freedom is the nature of the individual. Thus, paying homage and honor to freedom is the philosophical light within the American individual citizen that can protect that citizen from the sense that he or she may be overcome by the results of any leaders who may have failed them by wrongly impeaching a brilliant and most dedicated, saving president like Donald Trump. Remember: we the people have the right to vote Trump into office in November.
In reviewing the power of the legislature to possibly corrupt the presidential powers of executive leadership, thus setting a precedent legally antithetical to the nature of the Constitution’s provisions, the authors of the Constitution actually warned against the very tendencies of the legislative branch of governing to work against the executive branch. Thus were the separation of powers of the three branches provided, and also they were to be effected by a system of checks and balances.
The penultimate transgression of the separation of powers by the legislative branch so that it could rein in the executive branch as it just attempted to do with the impeachment preferment of Trump by the House of Representatives could lie and would lie as Alexander Hamilton had presciently supposed in the power of the impeachment of the executive officer, the president.
More of the specifics of the recent impeachment of President Donald Trump in the House and his subsequent acquittal in the Senate make up the current thread of exposition in this series of podcasts, Oh Say Nation. In succeeding episodes, elaborations upon the players and the events and words can be unfolded.
We must in these trying days that challenge the conscience of good citizens everywhere remember that to guard our own freedom as citizens is our deep desire and should become our most careful watch. We must assert the power of the election of the president in the next cycle with our power to vote. We must not let our leaders in Washington simply declare by a questionable impeachment that the vote of the people to elect a president in our great democratic nation has lost its very voice. We must re-elect the president who has had the courage to fight for the restitution of our country – who has both declared that fight and conducted that fight because he sees the truth and knows what has gone wrong. That vision of President Trump scares the liberals who think that the individual lives a life of destined inequality as imposed upon that individual by external trappings; yet, the great philosophical foundational thinking of our democracy believes that allowing the individual the legal standing of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ harmonizes with the natural and inalienable rights with which all citizens are born. The case in point here happens to be the president of the United States of America who has been under intense investigations by his opposing party now who declared him guilty and then set out to find some crime or other. Then again, just who are the liberals to declare that the people suffer rampant inequality, and that the government must pay for it in order to balance things back to a fair socialist democracy. That is the perilous seed of communism that is being touted by the liberal left in this country. Indeed, there is no guarantee that all people everywhere will feel the same sense of equality and freedom in our democracy; however, at the root of the question of happiness that comes with a sense of being free and equal is the idea that such a pursuit of happiness, claimed in the Declaration of Independence, can at least be mustered by any willing individual through faith. In a tyranny the test of faith is everywhere, all the time, and it is not so simple to just sit down one day and derive a unique way to pursue happiness if atrocities of imposed cruelties are pounding the senses and sensitivities of the people on an average day of living. We of America are fortunate people. We do have a chance to at least pursue happiness no matter how much oppression may challenge. That alone is a great gift that can free the innate potential of the human being to blossom forth despite all obstacles and setbacks. Why: It is because the pursuit of happiness as a God-given right engenders hope for an individual. Furthermore, so many fellow people may oftentimes cognize the powerful will of a downtrodden person to rise above any and all sense of inequality and socially attributed injustice; and then that success story will broadcast to others that all is not pre-destined against the thriving of an individual due to the oppression of others. In tyrannies the rule of the cruel and zealous overthrow so much of the sense of hope and opportunity to do better in life that this has the power to foment indelible poverty itself.
My fellow people, just as in the Senate impeachment trial the defense lawyers of President Trump defended him and in so doing defended the rule of law in our land and therefore its sancta sanctorum, the sacred individual in the reductionist sense in our profound democratic philosophical way of thinking, let us unite against the Machiavellian mentality that seems to have gripped the Congressional leaders of the now far leftist Democratic party. We can get at the nidus of the infection they have impulsed upon the rule of law and the power and meaning of the election process by standing up for truth and justice, for the American way, and for the Constitution. How? We can vote to re-elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency. We the people can rule out this failure of our political system to serve the people as we just witnessed in the impeachment politics so dangerous to our voting power. Yes, we deserve social justice by writ of our innate freedom as guarded also by the birth of a great democracy that believes in that freedom, in that freedom for all and equally at the root of things. Anything concrete like a government starts indeed from an abstract premise, and that is the genius that is in and through our democratic way of life and thinking — each person is born free, is free by the laws of nature. GET OUT AND VOTE FOR TRUMP!
This will conclude the first episode of Oh Say Nation, entitled, Concerning the Recent Impeachment of President Trump, a podcast in its developing stages. Please stay tuned and watch for developments at hand.
Marilynn Stark
February 16 – 17, 2020.
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