But that act on its own didn’t count as a constitutional crisis, because the Constitution prescribes an answer to presidential abuse of office: impeachment.
The House has no obligation to allow the subject of an impeachment inquiry to present a defense, though the House might find it useful to hear what defense might be offered. The president, like any other impeached officer, would have an opportunity to present a defense, cross-examine witnesses, and the like at the Senate trial.
Copy Link URL Copied! The Trump administration has now set the stage for a constitutional crisis, one that the United States hasn’t seen in this form since the battles between Andrew Johnson and the Reconstruction Congress more than 150 years ago.
Now that President Trump has announced — via a letter signed by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel — that he will not cooperate in any way with the impeachment inquiry begun in the House of Representatives, we no longer have just a crisis of the presidency.
In political science, a constitutional crisis is a problem or conflict in the function of a government that the political constitution or other fundamental governing law is perceived to be unable to resolve.
Article II, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution defines the grounds for impeachment and conviction as ''treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
After the House of Representatives sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate, the Senate sits as a High Court of Impeachment to consider evidence, hear witnesses, and vote to acquit or convict the impeached official. A committee of representatives, called “managers,” act as prosecutors before the Senate.
The voting rule in these contested cases favors the President; the Vice President continues acting as President only if two-thirds majorities of both chambers agree that the President is unable to serve.
the vice presidentUnder the 25th Amendment, if a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments concur, the vice president can remove a president who is incapacitated or physically or mentally unable to perform their duty. The president can then appeal to Congress.
The 25th Amendment is a separate process from impeachment, which allows Congress to remove a sitting president if a majority of the House of Representatives votes that he has committed treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and a trial in the Senate convicts him.
Supreme Court justices serve for life, unless they resign or are impeached and removed from office. The reason for their lifetime tenure is to enable them to make decisions free from any pressure by the executive or legislative branches of government.
First, we face a situation where the Constitution does not provide a clear, definitive answer to a basic problem of governance. Second, the political actors whose conflict is creating the problem appear ready to press their competing courses of action to the limit.
The Constitution gives the House the power to impeach. An impeachment inquiry is therefore a valid legislative purpose under the Constitution — and impeachment-related subpoenas should be enforced by the courts. The president could always assert executive privilege with respect to particular confidential documents.
When President Nixon refused to comply with a valid subpoena issued by a federal court, there was no clear answer in the Constitution as to which branch of government would prevail. Mr. Nixon wouldn’t budge, and neither the special prosecutor nor the court was willing to back down. The crisis was resolved only after the Supreme Court ordered ...
When two branches of government are locked in a standoff, it’s always possible that the third branch of government might come in to resolve it. In this instance, that’s the judiciary, and the Supreme Court is the obvious candidate for the role.
Such claims of privilege could be analyzed by the courts under existing constitutional precedents. There is no precedent in constitutional doctrine, however, supporting a president’s blanket refusal to comply with any subpoenas regardless of privilege.
Passing such a resolution might be a good idea for the House. But it would not qualify as backing down. To the contrary, passing a resolution to investigate impeachment would raise the stakes in the constitutional confrontation.
Congress can demand that the president comply, but it can’t very well send its sergeant-at-arms to the White House to enforce its subpo enas. You might say that under the Constitution, the House could justifiably impeach the president for refusing to participate in the impeachment inquiry.
The White House issued a bombastic letter rejecting the impeachment inquiry Tuesday. It included legal citations, but it would be thrown out by any court in the country , according to Jennifer Rodgers, a CNN legal analyst and lecturer at Columbia Law School .
Trump has rejected the impeachment inquiry as a “kangaroo court,” but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t caught his attention. He’s talking to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, his would-be protector in the Senate, up to three times each day, according to a new CNN report. It takes only a bare majority of Democrats to impeach Trump in the House, but 20 Republicans would have to vote in the Senate to remove him from office.
At the heart of the Teapot Dome Scandal was why president Harding’s Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty had not investigated the Secretary of Interior Albert Fall’s shady dealings — including outright bribes — over oil rights in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
The letter from the White House is a political stunt that misinterprets the Constitution, ignores relevant precedents , and defies common sense . The Constitution does not say much about impeachment, but what it does state is clear, simple, and right there in Article I. The House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.”
It is hard for the White House to convincingly maintain that its complete refusal to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry is “legal” in the usual sense, but the White House is operating with politics, rather than law, in mind.
The Constitution’s meaning is in question. Sometimes the Constitution’s attempt to address an issue is phrased in a way that could allow multiple interpretations, leaving experts disagreeing about what it means and making it difficult or impossible to address a pressing problem.
Indeed, the Supreme Court overturned many of the New Deal’s main provisions. In 1937, Roosevelt threatened to change the makeup of the court, asking Congress to add seats (which is within their power) so that he could pack the court with new appointees who were more likely to vote his way.
If he refuses to leave, however, that would certainly spark a constitutional crisis. 3. The Constitution tells us what to do, but it’s not politically feasible.
The problem sparked by the Civil War is obvious: The fight rested on a bunch of unsettled constitutional questions, the biggest of which was about slavery and the federal government’s ability to control it, a subject on which the Constitution was silent.
The Constitution’s system of checks and balances sets the various branches against each other for the laudable purpose of constraining tyranny. However, due to partisan polarization, individual corruption, or any number of other reasons, sometimes the political institutions in these arrangements fail, sending the governmental system into a crisis. This was the type of constitutional crisis commentators were seemingly referring to in describing reports that Customs and Border Protection agents (members of the executive branch) weren’t following orders from the judicial branch.
The main controversies of his administration thus far have been over the substance of his actions, and the immigration order was blocked mainly on the grounds that it violated the constitutional rights of individuals, not that it represented executive overreach.
Congress censured Andrew Jackson for taking aggressive steps to destroy the Second Bank of the United States instead of waiting for its charter to expire.
If the House misuses its impeachment power, then that argument can be made to senators in an impeachment trial and to voters at the next congressional election. Asserting a contested claim of executive privilege might be mistaken, but such disputes can be resolved within the political and judicial process.
Congress can reassert and vindicate its own powers by holding the president to account. Republicans in Congress would do well to emphasize to the president that it is not for him to decide whether an impeachment is invalid and whether congressional investigations are worthy of cooperation.
Since the 2018 midterm election, the Trump White House has been increasingly bold in declaring its authority to stonewall, impede and ignore congressional investigations. The recent letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes even further.
Despite what Trump and Cipollone argue, Congress following the constitutional rules to impeach a president for alleged high crimes and misdemeanors is not a constitutional crisis. The framers provided that mechanism expecting that its use would be unusual but sometimes necessary. Advertisement.
Advertisement. Andrew Johnson only ceased his opposition to Congress when it became clear that was the only way to save his presidency and serve out the remainder of his term in office. Trump might need to be convinced of the same.