How Constitutional is the House Impeachment Inquiry?
Addressing The Myth House Democrat Impeachment Inquiry is Unconstitutional
You may have been hearing on the news lately the White House and various Republicans consider the current House impeachment inquiry as unconstitutional. Some of the language used by the White House, including Vice President Pence includes “due process rights”, and “executive privilege”.
First of all, due process is for trials in court, and a House Impeachment Inquiry is not a trial. Impeachment by the House is mostly gathering evidence and information. The entire purpose of the inquiry is to determine whether the gathered evidence warrants a trial in the Senate or not.
Everything the House Democrats are doing is supported by the Constitution.
Recently, Hillary Clinton reminded us in a PBS interview, and it is documented here, that Richard Nixon was never impeached. In fact, his impeachment never made it beyond the Judiciary Committee. You read that correctly: Nixon resigned before the House brought impeachment to a full vote for their part of the process. Only the Judiciary Committee had voted to move forward with impeachment after they collected evidence. They brought forward three articles of impeachment against Nixon. After the Judiciary Committee approved the three articles of impeachment, some Republicans went to Nixon and advised he resign as full impeachment was imminent.
Everything the House Democrats are doing is supported by the Constitution. The Republican cry that the current process is Unconstitutional is simply untrue. The House has authority to pursue impeachment a couple of different ways and it does not require a full vote of the House to make it happen for the evidence gathering part of the process. No matter how the House chooses to initiate the inquiry, the only time the full House vote is important is in deciding the process is ready to move forward to the Senate, where the actual trial begins. There is more about the history and details of how impeachment happens here. For those who want to read Article II of the Constitution, impeachment is addressed in Section 4.
“if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.”
Since the trial is in the Senate, the charge of Democrats violating due process is nothing short of ridiculous. For civilians, we don’t have a right to oversee a prosecutor gathering evidence against us and crying about due process before charges are even filed. That is exactly what Trump, Pence, and other Republicans are doing. Their argument is literally “we don’t like this prosecutor is attempting to gather evidence to bring charges against us.” The real reason this is their argument is because they don’t want their crimes exposed to the general public. As the House gathers evidence, they know the media will be reporting on what is found along the way.
A meme is going around in Democrat circles that talks about Benghazi. It describes the contrast of the Obama Administration to the actions of the Trump White House. For the Benghazi investigations, the Obama White House turned over ALL requested documents, and Hillary Clinton sat for an 11 hour testimony in Congress. As a reminder, the Republican-led Congress found no wrong doing by the State Department in Benghazi after two years of investigations.
It seems if Pence, Trump, Giuliani, et al are completely innocent of wrong doing, they would fully cooperate with the House and turn in all documents requested and participate in all testimonies. After all, a favorite Republican expression is, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.”
