Impeachment And Revolution American Style

Exclusive: Alan Keyes explains founders’ logic in establishing constitutional process

WND

ALAN KEYES

As the territorial and Constitution walls of their authority as a people are being sapped and battered down, Americans are beginning urgently to consider what, if anything, they can do. Some seem content to let things go until experience with the harsh reality of tyranny leaves no alternative but to resist, even if it means war. Though many of them profess to admire the wisdom of America’s founders, apparently in this respect they believe that the founding generation offers no instruction.

This is partly the result of the degenerate understanding of revolution the word presently invokes. Since the horrors of the French Revolution, it evokes an explosion of pent-up hatred and indignation. Political, religious and racial ideologies harnessed these two congenital passions. The always durable vengefulness of human nature sustained them over generations. This made for revolutions that spun off purges, pogroms and other campaigns of mass extermination, salting “killing fields” with vast populations of death throughout the 20th, and now into the 21st century.

This explosive paradigm of revolution, driven by unreflecting hatred and resentment, is alien to the America tradition. America’s prevalent founders saw the revolution that produced America’s Declaration of Independence in a very different light. As Madison wrote:

“[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.”

John Adams thought that this reflective foresight effected the historic change that most of all constituted the substance of the American Revolution.

“As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of 15 years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” (letter to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 24, 1815)

For the founders the best proof of the success of the American Revolution was not victory in war, but the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. In light of that fact, we ought to take the time to ponder the logic of its provisions. Why, for example, does the Constitution require a simple majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in order to impeach a civil officer of the U.S. government, but a two-thirds majority in order to convict at trial in the U.S. Senate? What is the sense of that?

Well, impeachment is essentially the equivalent of an indictment, an accusation of wrongful action or behavior. So where U.S. civil officers are concerned, the Constitution makes it easier to accuse than to convict them. But like a formal indictment, impeachment does not involve groundless charges. It requires that a reasonable argument be presented to substantiate the charges, as to both the facts and the law involved in any given case.

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When it comes to high crimes and misdemeanors within the purview of the president of the United States, the case involves matters so fundamental to the justice and legitimacy of the U.S. government that a decision one way or another inevitably has revolutionary implications. Seen in this way the process of impeachment (the investigation, formulation and approval of the charges to be tried) is analogous to the process that took place in the years Adams alludes to, before America’s Declaration of Independence. It is the process that informs, articulates and confirms the will of the people, bringing them together in the righteous conviction required to sustain liberty.

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Reposted with permission