Impeachment Both Cause and Effect of a Too-Powerful Presidency

[EasyAce]

If, at the end of all this, President Mike Pence sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, what has been accomplished?
By Katherine Mangu-Ward
https://reason.com/2019/11/02/impeachment-is-both-the-cause-and-the-effect-of-a-too-powerful-presidency/

By focusing all of its efforts on impeachment during a presidential campaign, Congress has given away the game: Its members are little more than pawns in a winner-take-all battle for the presidency and its vast and ever-growing powers. Worse, they seem to prefer it that way . . .

. . . [W]hat is in fact contrary to the democratic spirit is the monarchical idea that the president alone is the embodiment of the power of the people, the lone defender of our rights. That's a big job. And the Founders, in their great and unmatched wisdom, saw fit to distribute it across a rather large cast of characters. They gave the House the impeachment power in order to make coups unnecessary. The existence of elections cannot logically make impeachments a violation of the democratic process. Every president who has been impeached was, after all, voted into office first.

Trump could very well be re-elected post-impeachment. And any attempt by Congress at that point to prevent him from being sworn in a second time would indeed be undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unconscionable—an actual coup.

Rather than squabble over the presidency, Congress can and should reassert its considerable constitutional powers. It could start by reclaiming the sole right to declare war and rediscovering its lawmaking authority, the latter of which it has ceded to executive branch bureaucrats out of laziness, cowardice, and general ineptitude in the face of genuinely difficult work. But there's little evidence the legislative branch has any intention of doing that.