House State Government Committee Public Hearing: Fill & Download for Free

After being mainly a lurker here on Quora, I’ll take the bait on this one.While this question and the underlying assertion by Sen. Graham are meant to evoke an emotional response, I'll try to keep my response factual and not to editorialize.TL;DR: Not unfair, but, because of the president's and his defenders' behavior, dangerous to the rule of law.First, some basics that (unfortunately for some) need spelling out:1) Impeachment is not a criminal process that requires adherence to the normal, 5th Amendment concepts of due process. Instead, as clearly recognized by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 65, it is a purely political process (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed65.asp). Even the Constitution, in Article I, Section 3, specifically says, "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States...," though the impeached individual would still be subject to criminal liability outside the impeachment process (that's where your 5th Amendment due process rights would apply).2) The House of Representatives is granted the sole power of impeachment, under Article I, Section 2 (last paragraph), of the United States Constitution (https://usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec2.html).3) Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution spells out the impeachable offenses of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Along with the (probably) straightforward "Treason" and "Bribery," impeachable "high Crimes and Misdemeanors," according to Hamilton, represent "the abuse or violation of some public trust." As a purely political matter, though, and as recognized by former President Gerald Ford before he took office upon Nixon's resignation, "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." Succinctly, the absence of a crime does not equate to the absence of an impeachable offense.4) The Constitution doesn't spell out how the House is to go about its business in reaching a decision on impeachment. But generally speaking, the proceedings in the House must follow the House Rules adopted at the beginning of each "new" Congress. The House Rules adopted at the beginning of the current (116th) Congress are at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/HMAN-116/pdf/HMAN-116.pdf, and they are reportedly, by and large, the same rules as adopted by the House when under a Republican majority (see https://www.nationalmemo.com/house-republicans-complain-about-rules-they-approved-in-2015/?cn-reloaded=1, which references a Republican-made change to the rules in 2015, that stripped minority committee members' say in subpoena issuance). I haven't found a House Rule that requires a vote of the entire House to begin an impeachment inquiry, and the Constitution itself is silent on that. As far as I can tell, standing committees, like Oversight and Foreign Affairs, generally have the authority and discretion to hold hearings to investigate matters within their respective purview in furtherance of a legislative purpose (including determining the need for, and the drafting of, legislation), without a vote of the full House. It follows, then, that each of these committees has a legitimate interest in the matters brought up by the whistleblower's complaint and confirmed by released documents and public statements of the president and his advisers.5) The president has not yet been impeached. Three House standing committees (Oversight, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs) are conducting the inquiry. The full House will get a chance to vote on impeachment itself if the committees find enough compelling evidence of one or more "violation[s] of some public trust" on the part of the president.That's it for the primer.I, of course, presume and believe that the circumstances leading up to and surrounding incident described in the whistleblower’s complaint form a reasonable basis for an impeachment inquiry. If you don’t agree with that premise, stop reading.So, first, has the process been "fair" on the part of the House leadership and the three standing committees jointly conducting the inquiry? This can be a subjective question, but if they are following established House rules, how can it not be fair? Near as I can tell, it's House Rule XI, clauses 2(g) and 2(k)(5) that allows the standing committees (including those involved in the impeachment inquiry) to hold closed hearings, to the exclusion of House members not on those committees. There's no evidence that the minority members of those committees are being excluded from participating in those closed-door hearings. In fact, I've read somewhere that a full quarter of the Republican-minority are in those closed-door hearings because they have membership on one of the committees conducting them. [Edit: Apparently, at least one of the House Republicans entitled to participate in the closed-door hearings isn’t even attending, nor has he bothered reading the testimony: GOP Congressman Admits He Could Have Gone to Impeachment Hearings But Didn’t, Hasn’t Read Testimony.]What I do think is not fair is that members of the House and Senate are drawing a salary meant to pay for their tending to the interests of the American public (the "General Welfare," so to speak), but, instead, they're seemingly spending their time defending the president, including time organizing and executing the storm-the-gates incident, etc. Another observation along these lines: How can one label the majority in the House as "do-nothing Democrats," when the majority leader in the Senate publicly brags about his chamber being the "legislation graveyard" for any Democratic legislative priority coming from the House. If the House majority were able to consider legislation without the certainty that their time was being wasted because of a majority in the Senate more focused on reshaping the judiciary, perhaps they'd have less time to scrutinize the president's behavior. Just sayin'.Has the impeachment inquiry so far been dangerous? Yes, but because of the actions of the president, his White House, and his allies in and out of his administration. The rule of law is in jeopardy. Our Constitution establishes that no one is above the law. The president swore his constitutional oath to "faithfully execute the Office of President," and to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." 1) Impeachment is not a "phony" provision of the Constitution; and 2) any executive agency's refusal to supply documents requested by the Oversight Committee is a violation of 5 U.S.C 2954 (https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title5-section2954&num=0&edition=prelim). Yet the president claims the first (that impeachment is phony) -- in violation of his oath -- and directs his administration to ignore the second - in violation of his oath and of federal law. If Republicans don't believe the president should be held to account, then they claim, by extension, that the president (or any president) is above the law. Talk about slippery slopes; this one literally tops them all.So that's my answer.FWIW, I have a side note that illustrates the slippery slope. It's the matter of "moving the goal post," that the president and his defenders are engaging in. When the whistleblower complaint about the president's call with the Ukrainian president came out, the call was described as "perfect." As proof of it being a perfect call, the president confidently authorized the release of a memorandum of the call, the contents of which didn't quite live up to the "perfect" hype, and, instead, pretty much validated the whistleblower's complaint. (BTW: That validation rendered as moot the need for the testimony of the whistleblower, whose anonymity must be preserved for the sake of all future whistleblowers.) Then came (goal-post move #1) the defense of the content of the call, elucidated by the memo, as not containing a quid pro quo. [Here, I must explain to those who a) don't know Latin, or b) didn't go to law school, or c) had never heard the term: Quid pro quo means, literally, this for that -- an exchange of one thing (usually of value) for something else in return. Every time you go to the store and buy something, you've engaged in a quid pro quo with the store for that something. It could take the form of an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" situation.] Then came the admission (goal-post move #2) that it was a quid pro quo, but that those happen all the time in foreign relations. [Here, I don't think anyone could dispute that there are routine quid pro quo situations in foreign relations for the benefit of the people of the United States, but not for the personal benefit of its chief executive.] Then, finally, you have the (goal-post move #3) offense-defense, that abuse of power is not impeachable. [Here, I refer you back to Hamilton's words, "abuse or violation of some public trust," and ask Republicans who are defending the president's behavior whether they would feel comfortable with a word substitution in the presidential oath, making it "abuse the Office of the President of the United States."]EDIT 10/31/19: I clarified some language regarding the House Rules I cited as governing closed-door hearings. Those Rules aren’t limited to impeachment inquiries, but apply to any standing committee for any matter, including the three committees involved here, and including impeachment. Also, corrected due-process reference from 4th Amendment (search-and-seizure) to 5th Amendment (criminal due process). [Thank you, Chris Stevens, for pointing that out].Cheers,Vince

There are several questions embedded within this one.Do I think Trump deserves impeachment? Yes, I do.Do I think Trump should be impeached? Yes, I do.Do I think they should vote on impeachment right now? No, I don’t.They might all look like the same but there are important differences:1) Deserving impeachment is about whether there’s been serious misconduct rising to the level of impeachment. It is a question all its own so here I’ll just say there are ample grounds (many listed later in this post). The question is how many of those ample grounds should Congress gather evidence on and build a case for?2) Should he be impeached is different than deserving impeachment because it incorporates questions of strategy and precedent.—2a) Strategy: Some people fear it backfiring and making things worse, emboldening him, helping his electoral prospects, hurting their own. These are not frivolous concerns, but I think they’re unfounded.—2b) Precedent: Failure to impeach an overwhelmingly deserving defendant will encourage and embolden future misbehavior and fail to deter improper conduct. A president who breaks laws, abuses power, ignores subpoenas, flouts oversight, violates the public trust, etc. unabated without any consequences will not only continue to do so and become even more audacious in their lawlessness, but their successors will follow their lead and a new dystopian normal will put our constitutional system on the path to ruination.When Republican Congressman Justin Amash called for Trump’s impeachment, he made an important point:While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.3) If I think he deserves impeachment and I think he should be impeached, why don’t I think he should be impeached right now?Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi likes to quote Abraham Lincoln:[P]ublic sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.Right now the public isn’t there yet. Few have read the Mueller report. Few are aware of the full extent of Trump’s misconduct, even beyond the scope of Mueller’s findings. Congress needs to gather the evidence and present it in a public forum. If they simply pull the trigger on impeachment, Mitch McConnell can shelve it tomorrow and the whole thing is over. They’ve fired their one bullet and nothing came of it. It’s not going to get a fair hearing in the Senate, so the information has to come out before the House votes on impeachment. They can’t put the cart before the horse.The rest of that Lincoln quote goes like this:Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.The House can “pronounce” the decision to impeach, but they need 2/3 of the Senate to convict and remove him from office, and currently more than half are Republican Senators bending over backwards to carry the president’s water. They’re twisting themselves into knots to excuse his behavior, reverse their previous positions, ignore the principles they once claimed to hold. They respond to public sentiment, but mainly their base, not usually the public at large. Until the base is moved, or the silent majorities are sufficiently informed, aroused, and motivated to act, they will continue to be more fearful of the defendant than the public whose trust he violates.What I favor is robust oversight and hearings to gather evidence and bring the shameful depths of presidential misconduct to the American people’s attention. Whether these hearings are done under normal oversight procedures or formal impeachment proceedings is not for me to say. I certainly want and expect to see the latter, but whether the most sound strategy is to do that this month, or next month, or in three months, is best decided by the experts. They just won two court cases that slapped the administration’s maximalist “no oversight” position down pretty hard. They’ve been playing their hands pretty shrewdly to form the strongest possible cases. I’d like to see more, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that they’re wrong.The timing is extremely tricky. The more time passes, the stronger the House’s cases get and the more rulings they’ll win, but the more Trump can delay accountability, run out the clock, and sow further confusion and misinformation with the public.Unlike Clinton (Bill), Trump is not starting out with strong popularity. His approval rating has never been above 50% and has typically been quite a bit lower, whereas Clinton was broadly popular both before and after impeachment with a sky high 66% rating. Trump is routinely in the 30s and considers the low 40s a good month. The case against Trump is also a good deal stronger, broader, and about more serious issues.The same is true when comparing Trump to Nixon. One of the Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutors, Jill Wine-Banks, explained it well:[T]he more analogous case against Trump is Nixon’s impeachment, not Clinton’s. That is true because of the similarity and seriousness of the underlying wrongdoing and the acts of obstruction of justice in Watergate and Trumpgate versus the sexual misconduct and perjury charges that Clinton faced. Unlike Clinton, Nixon faced – as Trump does now – grave charges of abuse of power, ignoring Congressional subpoenas, obstruction of justice by misuse of government agencies, firing federal investigators, hush money payments, dangling pardons, perjury and subornation of perjury, witness tampering, and stonewalling Congress. As in the case of Nixon, Trump aides (plus Russians in the case of Trump) were indicted and convicted or pleaded guilty. No Clinton aides were ever indicted. It was not organized crime.In fact, the case for impeachment of Trump is stronger because he has engaged in a broader stonewalling than Nixon ever did. Not only has he obstructed the investigations by Mueller, rejected the findings of all our national intelligence agencies while accepting the denials of President Putin, and suppressed the full Mueller Report and its underlying evidence from the public and Congress (despite Congress’ clear right to such material), he has gone even further with a long list of obstructive, immoral and illegal acts: barring Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, and other witnesses from testifying before Congress regarding the Russia investigation; barring testimony by DHS employees to prevent oversight of his immigration policies, which include putting children in cages; prohibiting witnesses to testify about the security clearance process called into question by his overruling the judgment of career employees who saw national security dangers in granting some clearances; withholding his tax returns despite a law that mandates they be produced; suing to prevent disclosure of his legitimately subpoenaed financial records; and much more. This systematic contempt of Congress combined with the well-established election interference of the Russians and Trump’s failure to take action to prevent its recurrence – or even to acknowledge it happened – is a deadly combination that threatens the role of the first branch of government as a foundational part of our democracy.Like the evidence I saw against Nixon, the evidence already public against Trump unquestionably supports action against him. I and more than 900 other former federal prosecutors signed a letter that states flatly if the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel Opinion didn’t prohibit indictment of a sitting president, Trump would and should be indicted for obstruction of justice.The 900 prosecutors she cited now actually exceeds one thousand.Trump is historically unpopular to begin with, and historically lawless, but we need to get the people on board. Nixon won a landslide reelection, before public hearings on his misconduct turned the public against him. As with Trump, his party supported him in Congress…until they suddenly didn’t. Public sentiment is everything. So, one step at a time.There is no benefit to impeaching today and putting the ball in Mitch McConnell’s court tomorrow. The smarter play is to bring all his misdeeds—or as many as it takes—to light, in a public forum. Not a thick report no one reads, not a closed intelligence committee hearing, but public hearings with cameras and witnesses. Michael Cohen testified and riveted the public. It upstaged Trump’s Vietnam trip. It led to new revelations about bank fraud and insurance fraud, among other things.The Dems have struggled to get witnesses to testify, but the struggle is worth it. Ultimately, something will happen. They’ll find witnesses who don’t refuse, they’ll punish or compel witnesses that do.As I said before, whether these should be formally called impeachment hearings right now or not is not for me to say. It’s very complicated. I can write you a list of pros and cons and probably not think of all of them. But we’ll get there. 50 Democrats in the House (and 1 Republican!) are already in favor of starting impeachment proceedings. I suspect the true number is larger. Dems need to do something to move public opinion lest they lose their moment, but an impeachment vote is not that thing, not yet.For more answers like this, check out: Political Clarity, Demystifying U.S. Politics.

A few things to note here:The Republican Party felt that lying (admittedly under oath) over a consensual sexual act was sufficient grounds for impeaching a sitting President. Trump has far exceeded anything Clinton did - the incident with the Ukraine alone is a violation of multiple Federal laws. It’s funny how things change, I suppose.The President can forbid handing over documents, but doing so would be a direct challenge to Congress, and would likely constitute Contempt of Congress - another impeachable offense. The only reason such actions wouldn’t constitute ‘Obstruction of Justice’ is because these aren’t judicial hearings: they’re Congressional oversight.For reference, the evidence isn’t ‘hearsay’: we’ve had direct testimony from a whole truckload of State Department and Ambassadorial officials who have testified not only that Trump initiated a campaign to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, but also that the State Department’s efforts were undermined by those actions, and that Ukraine were most certainly aware that the security aid would only be released if President Zelensky officially (and publicly) declared an investigation into Burisma and the Bidens.Note that these constitute a breach of three Federal laws:The Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951) - which forbids any government official (elected or appointed) from extorting for personal gain under ‘colour of official right’.18 U.S.C § 872: “Whoever, being an officer, or employee of the United States or any department or agency thereof, or representing himself to be or assuming to act as such, under color or pretense of office or employment commits or attempts an act of extortion, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”52 U.S.C § 30121: “It shall be unlawful for…a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national.”Preventing witnesses from testifying or failing to hand over documents is, at this point, entirely irrelevant - Congress has Trump dead-to-rights on multiple Federal felonies. They’ve more than sufficient evidence just from the testimony we’ve seen up to this point to impeach and remove him from office.Not that the Republicans will back this, but honestly, the Democrats need to start making it very clear that Trump has violated Federal law, and remind the general public what would happen to them if they had done the same. They’ll soon see the scope of the problem.Edit: Greg Larson, being his usual excellent self, was kind enough to inform me of the text of U.S. Code § 1505.Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees, which thus states:“Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress…shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.”Full text is here: 18 U.S. Code § 1505 - Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees