Don't Freak Out About Impeachment

[EasyAce]

Americans can lose their jobs for almost anything. Why are we so hesitant to give presidents the boot?
By Gene Healy
https://reason.com/2019/12/20/fired/

Nobody likes losing his job, but if there's any country on Earth that's copacetic about firing people, it's these United States of America. Almost alone among industrialized democracies, the U.S. hews to the old-school regime of employment at will, which means most of us can be frogmarched out of the building at any time—for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all . . .

. . . This is the country that pioneered the idea of firing people as entertainment. For 14 seasons of NBC's reality TV game show The Apprentice, Americans tuned in eagerly to see which contestants would be shown the door with the signature line "You're fired!" Then, in 2016, we went and elected the game-show host president of the United States . . .

. . . Since his inauguration, Donald Trump's tenure has been a whirlwind of self-dealing, management pratfalls, and public meltdowns of the sort that might get a mere captain of industry summarily canned. Luckily for him, he's failed upward into a post that comes with more job protection than the vast majority of American workers enjoy. Somehow we've decided that the one job in America where you have to commit a felony to get fired is the one where you also control nuclear weapons. Given the damage an unfit president can do, shouldn't it be easier to get rid of one?

. . . Few if any of the Framers viewed the prospect of a presidential pink slip with the unbridled horror now common among America's political and intellectual elites . . . Twenty years ago, with Bill Clinton in the crosshairs, it was Democrats hurling the c word: "This partisan coup d'état," Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.) insisted, "will go down in infamy in the history of this nation"—like Pearl Harbor, apparently.

Only a partisan hack would say such things. Trump's removal would "reverse" the 2016 election only if it installed Hillary Clinton rather than Mike Pence as his successor. What kind of a "coup" replaces one elected official with his hand-picked, duly elected, and loyal-to-a-fault running mate?

We're also told that impeachment is a dangerous distraction from…whatever else the federal government would otherwise be doing . . . what are Congress and the president being distracted from? Reining in trillion-dollar deficits? Not much chance of that. Perhaps they would be handling what [David] Brooks informed us in another column is the public's core concern: "elite negligence in the face of national decline" . . .

. . . The presidency has grown far too powerful to entrust to any one fallible human. Will the current impeachment drive do anything about that? . . . history proves there's no guarantee any particular impeachment will further that purpose. The Johnson showdown coincided with, but probably didn't cause, a long period of congressional assertiveness. Bill Clinton's personal "hell" had little effect on the balance of powers between the branches, other than forging a bipartisan consensus to get rid of independent counsels . . . The post-Watergate Congresses enacted a suite of significant, if imperfect, restrictions on executive power . . . [they] made a lot of mistakes, and the good they did was steadily undermined by less assertive lawmakers in the decades that followed. But they carried out the last serious effort to limit executive power . . .