Thank-You ‘Madam
President’ for this.
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HISTORIANS’
STATEMENT ON THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT TRUMP
We are American
historians devoted to studying our nation’s past who have concluded that Donald
J. Trump has violated his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President
of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of
the United States.” His “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” as George Mason
described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787,
urgently and justly require his impeachment.
President Trump’s
numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in
mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most
hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of
Ukraine, under attack from Russia, an adversary power to the United States, by
withholding essential military assistance in exchange for the fabrication and
legitimization of false information in order to advance his own re-election.
President
Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly
seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its
constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for
representative government. So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on
the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine
that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the
law.
As Alexander
Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with “the
misconduct of public men” which involves “the abuse or violation of some public
trust.” Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in
protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and
renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that
powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the
mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”
It is our considered
judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of
impeachment, then virtually nothing does
Hamilton understood,
as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an
unscrupulous demagogue, “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his
fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his
ordinary demeanour.” That demagogue, Hamilton said, could easily enough manage
“to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to
liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government
& bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non
sense of the zealots of the day.” Such a figure, Hamilton wrote, would “throw
things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
President Trump’s
actions committed both before and during the House investigations fit
Hamilton’s description and manifest utter and deliberate scorn for the rule of
law and “repeated injuries” to constitutional democracy. That disregard
continues and it constitutes a clear and present danger to the Constitution. We
therefore strongly urge the House of Representatives to impeach the President.
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