Impeachment as a Vote of No Confidence?

Impeachment as a Vote of No Confidence?

The United States does not have a parliamentary system of government. The parliamentary system of government developed in Great Britain, and I’ll use that country’s system as typical of parliamentary systems generally. In a parliamentary system the head of state, in England the monarch, asks one particular political party to form a government. That party is usually though perhaps not always the party with the most seats in the country’s parliament or other legislative body. The government is then usually made up of members of parliament from that party or other parties with which that party enters into a coalition government. The head of government (as opposed to the head of state) is the Prime Minister, the member of parliament the majority party designates as its leader. In Great Britain the parliament may in effect force the government to resign and hold new elections through what is called a “vote of no confidence.” A vote of no confidence is held in parliament when the members of parliament belonging to the governing party object in sufficient numbers to the policies the government is pursuing. It could also result from a belief that the ministers of that government have committed immoral or illegal acts, though the commission of such acts is not necessary for a vote of no confidence to be in order.

In the United States of course the government is not appointed by the majority party in Congress. Instead the President is elected through a process specified in the Constitution. The President may or may not belong to the party holding a majority of seats in either or both houses of Congress. The President appoints the members of his or her government, with the appointments usually requiring confirmation by the Senate. The President of the United States is both the head of state and the head of the government. The United States Constitution provides that Congress may remove the President (or any other member of the government) from office only through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. It specifies that impeachment is appropriate when the President or other governmental officer has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Article Two, Section Four. Only two Presidents of the United States, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have ever been impeached; and both were acquitted in the Senate and not removed from office. Richard Nixon of course resigned his office to avoid certain impeachment and conviction. There is no provision in the United States Constitution for anything like Britain’s vote of no confidence.

We are faced with a situation today that in any other democratic country would result in a vote of no confidence in the head of government if such a vote were available to the country’s legislative body. Donald Trump may or may not be guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” I suspect that he is, but it has not yet been proven that he is. It is however undeniable that Trump threatens the security and wellbeing of our nation with his pandering to right-wing extremists and his irresponsible, incomprehensible actions in foreign relations. Because of his bluster we face a greater possibility of nuclear war than we have faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis more than fifty years ago, albeit with North Korea rather than Russia. Because of Trump’s rash and poorly considered statements and actions we have lost the respect of most of our allies in the world. Trump pursues economic policies that can only be called fascist in their toadying up to large corporations and the wealthy people who run them and benefit from them. He legitimizes hate groups and violent actions against minority people of numerous sorts. Any responsible legislature in the world would vote no confidence in President Trump, but our Congress (to which I’m not at all sure the word responsible applies) does not have that option. It only has impeachment.

Would it be possible or desirable for Congress to begin to use impeachment as in effect a vote of no confidence? It would probably be possible. It is unlikely that the federal courts would ever overturn a vote of impeachment on the grounds that there was no evidence that the person impeached had in fact committed “bribery, treason, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The courts would certainly leave the judgment on that issue up to Congress. So Congress very probably could begin to use impeachment as a vote of no confidence.

The more difficult and interesting question is whether Congress should begin to use impeachment in that way. Some Democratic members of the House of Representatives have drafted articles of impeachment against Trump even though it has not yet been conclusively established that he has done anything that meets the constitutional criteria for impeachment. Those representatives may in fact be using impeachment as a de facto vote of no confidence, for they seem to be jumping the gun if the issue is truly impeachment as set out in the Constitution. It is easy enough for those of us appalled and frightened by Trump to wish that we had a vote of no confidence available to us as a means of removing him from office, but we don’t. We live under a constitutional system of government that does not provide for such a vote. As much as I hope that Trump will be forced from office before the end of his term, I cannot support turning impeachment into a vote of no confidence. It is theoretically possible to amend the US Constitution to provide for such a vote; but that hasn’t happened, and certainly won’t. Impeachment is what the Constitution gives us, so impeachment it must be.

There are multiple investigations underway that could well lead to the impeachment of President Trump. The most promising of them is Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, with which General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, is now cooperating. Various committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are also conducting investigations. We do not yet know where any of those investigations will lead, though it seems unlikely that they not produce indictments and possibly even impeachment proceedings. So we sit and wait. We watch. We hear the news. We pray that Trump will not do irreparable damage to our country and the world before he leaves the White House, however he eventually leaves the White House. If he is impeached we’ll get President Pence (also a terrifying thought, though Pence is apparently at least more emotionally stable than Trump is) unless Congress impeaches him too. But impeachment it is if it is to be anything that removes Trump from office. The Constitution does not create a vote of no confidence, so let’s not turn the Constitutional process of impeachment into something it is not.