Neal Katyal

We've all heard endless talk about the impeachment of President Trump in early 2020. Much of the talk was in available "sound bites" on TV or social media, either calling the impeachment a travesty of justice, or considering it to be a clear case of Presidential abuse. Neal Katyal's book "Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump", may not settle the argument as to whether or not the President should have been impeached, but does help the reader at least understand why many believed that impeachment was appropriate.

I had preveiously read another book on the subject, the "House Intelligence Committee Report" on the impeachment of President Trump, which detailed the reasons the House of Representatives in Congress felt that the President was guilty of abuse of power. In that Report, they laid out the evidence against the President, and while that specific report was somewhat repetitive in nature due to the multiple witnesses called before the Committee answering the same questions, at least you could begin to understand why charges were filed.

But that Committee Report didn't adequately clarify whether what President Trump did met the definition of, or rose to the level of an impeachable offense. For that, I turned to this book "Impeach". The author, Neal Katyal, is a professor of law at Georgetown University, has served as Acting Solicitor General, arguing a number of cases before the Supreme Court, and has taught Constitutional Law and classes on Impeachment. In trying to determine if he had an agenda when writing his book, I was curious to see if he overwhelming supported either the Democratic or Republic Party. He seems to have links to both political parties, having served in the Justice Department under Obama, but has taken an anti-Democratic Party position and endorsed President Trump's Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch, and also spoke highly of Trump's nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Having no clear bias, and having an extraordinary legal background, I felt Mr. Katyal would be able to provide good insights into the impeachment questions. Katyal has the credentials and experience to know what an impeachable offense is and isn't. In his book, Katyal shed some interesting light on what the Founding Fathers had in mind when considering impeachable offenses, and discussed what "high crimes and misdemeanors" actually meant at the time of the writing of the Constitution. It certainly wasn't what I thought, or what many others think it means. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is not, and has never been, limited to indictable criminality or violation of something in the criminal code. The history of the phrase extends far beyond mere criminal conduct. The British Parliament invented impeachment in the 14th Century as a counterweight against royal abuses of power. Parliament carefully kept impeachment open-ended, recognizing that one never knew in advance what form autocracy might take. Over the centuries, Parliament impeached a good many people for a wide variety of non criminal misconduct. When it did, the articles of impeachment tended to describe the defendant’s behavior as “high crimes and misdemeanors,”.

In early America, the Founders identified multiple noncriminal acts they considered to be impeachable. At the Virginia ratifying convention, James Madison and Wilson Nicholas said abuse of the pardon power would be impeachable. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton made the larger point that impeachment is directed at “political” offenses that “proceed from … the abuse or violation of some public trust.” A major concern the Founders had concerning an impeachable offense was the undue foreign influence of foreign powers upon a President. President Trump's withholding of Military Aid to Ukraine until or unless President Zelensky agreed to open an investigation into a political opponent, Joe Biden, had the appearance of giving Ukraine the ability to extract a pay-back from the United States at some point in the future, e.g., the U.S. would be indebted to Ukraine for the favor. The thinking was that Trump wouldn't want news of this "secret" deal to come out, and could be blackmailed into doing Ukraine's bidding.

While news of this secretive attempt to have President Zelensky do Trump a "favor" eventually was leaked to the press, and the military aid to Ukraine was eventually released without doing what President Trump wanted, intention to abuse power his power was not treated as any less significant by the Impeachment Committee. And it's true that the President did not actually achieve any "quid pro quo", however that may have only been due to the press leak. But if blackmail was the concern, it was unlikely to have been successful in my opinion. President Trump is the least likely blackmail victim ever. A man that could campaign for the office and proclaim that he could shoot someone on 5th Ave. in NYC, and his people would still support him, (and that certainly appears to be true) isn't a likely blackmail victim. President Trump's support is solid within his base, whether he's accused of having sexual affairs with a number of women, bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, inflating his net wealth, lying, or any of a variety of things most people would want to hide. Trump has proven to be capable of diverting any negatives about himself by calling it "fake news" or attributing it to "anti-Trumpers". Trump supporters are loyal, and unlikely to be deterred by any negative news, so blackmail is an unlikely concern.

Nonetheless, doing something wrong in the eyes of the law, or under the concept of impeachable offenses, whether or not you get away with it, is a totally different thing. And while President Trump was not convicted by the Senate, with only Mitch Romney supporting conviction among Republican Senators, other GOP politicians did agree that the President did do the things he was accused of in the Impeachment. Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander agreed that the President did something wrong, but felt that needed to be weighed against the President's accomplishments, and didn't vote to convict. He later noted that the president’s handling of aid to Ukraine “inappropriate,” acknowledging that Democrats had proven Trump did exactly what he was accused of, but he didn't feel it measured up to an impeachable offense. Florida Senator Marco Rubio was quoted as saying “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office”. And Senator Portman of Ohio similarly stated that he believed that some of the president’s actions, e.g., asking a foreign country to investigate a potential political opponent and the delay of aid to Ukraine were wrong and inappropriate, but went on to say he did not believe the president’s actions rose to the level of removing a duly-elected president from office.
Even Vice-President Pence, who indicated that the President's actions were not inappropriate, seemed to be of a different mind when he was a Congressman. In 2008, when referencing a witnesses report in a House Judiciary Committee hearing, he had stated that "...This business of high crimes and misdemeanors goes to the question of whether or not the person serving as the President of the United States put their own interests, their personal interests, ahead of personal service". Also, Senator Lindsey Graham, while supporting President Trump in this impeachment trial, felt quite differently about what was and was not an impeachable offense in 1998 when he said, "The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power of Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress and became the judge and jury."

So, even though President Trump survived the vote to convict him by the Senate, Mr Katyal's book does help everyone to understand impeachment a lot more. After reading this book, you're left with the idea of two contrasting views of Presidential visions. While President Kennedy famously stated: "Ask not what your Country can do for you, instead, ask what you can do for your Country", you are left with the impression that President Trump's comparable quote would be: "Ask not what you can do for your Country, instead, ask what a foreign Country can do for you".… (mehr)