(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

As we buttoned up the shebeen for the week, the Senate still had not voted on the Shove All The Money Upwards Act of 2017. Mitch McConnell was out there saying that the Republican majority had the votes to pass it. What they didn’t have was the bill itself, which was still being drafted as McConnell was speaking. This is transparently nuts, of course. But Lisa Murkowski will get her oil rigs in ANWR, and Susan Collins will get something she can pretend matters in Maine, and John McCain can go back to bellyaching uselessly about “regular order.” I think these people would have been fully capable of passing this bill even if it never actually existed.

What I am thinking about, however, is the president*, and I’m wondering whether, in the dark heart of his withered soul, if he’s worried about this tax thing passing. After all, once it does, the congressional Republicans have no real need for him anymore. They’ll get everything they need from Mike Pence, assuming he doesn’t have to take a Michael Flynn Fellowship at a grand jury and, even if Pence does, here comes Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, as the next in line of succession. The president* has to wonder how long the Congress will remain supine if they all get their “win” on the abomination of desolation that is the tax bill. They can’t all want to go down with him and his extended family of international grifters. He has to know that. I’m just afraid he’ll pull the temple down on his own combover.

I was intrigued by Ezra Klein’s opus on impeachment that ran on Vox this week, although, I admit, I was not as intrigued as Lawrence O’Donnell was. Klein took on the very tough constitutional question of whether a manifestly incompetent president—whether that involves mental incompetence, or simply being bad at the job, or, ahem, both—could be liable to being impeached by the Congress. Klein comes down in favor of what he calls “normalizing” impeachment.



Klein shrewdly goes back to the very first impeachment of a federal official—that of crazy-assed federal judge John Pickering in 1803—to argue that the impeachment power was not meant to be limited to actual criminal acts. I do think, however, that he pushes the Founders a little bit too far in his own direction.

Another way of looking at Pickering’s removal is that it shows the founding generation defining what the impeachment power was for, and what high crimes and misdemeanors meant. In his 1833 Commentaries, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story concluded that impeachment is “of a political character” and can be triggered by “gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, in the discharge of the duties of political office.” The Constitution’s framers considered a few variants of the impeachment power. An early proposal would have restricted it to acts of “treason and bribery” only. That was rejected for being too narrow. A subsequent proposal would have expanded it to acts of “maladministration” as well. That was rejected for being too broad. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was the compromise, but it was never clearly defined. What is clear is that high crimes and misdemeanors described far more than mere legal infractions. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that questions of impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

For me, the rejection of “maladministration” by the Constitutional Convention always has been a critical moment. Even if you argue that the president can be removed for political offenses that are not necessarily criminal, the impeachment process itself was never meant to be a common—or “normal”—political act. As Klein eventually admits, the Founders, as was their wont, left as much ambiguity in the impeachment power as they possibly could for future generations to chew on. To argue that impeachment can be pursued if enough people in Congress believe a president’s policies to be wrong, or if enough people in Congress believe the president is not up to the job, is to turn separation of powers on its head. For example, in the 1970s, in the middle of the oil shock, and the recession, and the Iranian hostage crisis, could a Republican Congress have judged Jimmy Carter to be impeachable because of how many things seemed to be going wrong with his administration at once?

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In addition, we have a more recent example of the impeachment process being pursued for purely political reasons. After the 1994 midterm elections, Republican aides were talking about impeaching Bill Clinton purely because they had the votes to do it. Both Ann Coulter and Congressman Bob Barr had published books arguing for Clinton’s impeachment long before the fateful pizza delivery to the Oval Office. That, eventually, Clinton fell into a perjury trap regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky is beside the point in this discussion. The Republicans were going to impeach him over something simply because they could. This cannot be a good thing.

You can argue, as Klein does, that the modern presidency has grown so powerful, and the balance of powers has tilted so far down toward the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue, that a strengthened impeachment power is one of the last remaining real checks on a president gone mad or incompetent. This is not a new idea, either. In an 1819 letter to Spencer Roane, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scarecrow; that such opinions as the one you combat, sent cautiously out, as you observe also, by detachment, not belonging to the case often, but sought for out of it, as if to rally the public opinion beforehand to their views, and to indicate the line they are to walk in, have been so quietly passed over as never to have excited animadversion, even in a speech of any one of the body entrusted with impeachment.

Here, Jefferson was talking about the impeachment of judges whom Jefferson already saw as usurping the powers of the other two branches of government, specifically in the case of Marbury v. Madison. It seems to me that the grounds for impeaching a president—who is, whatever we think of him, the only official of the government elected by the whole people—ought to be more tightly circumscribed than are the grounds for removing a federal judge. I am one of those people to whom Klein refers who are afraid to “break the glass” on this matter. I see the kind of people we elect to Congress these days, and I look at our gerrymandered and money-drowned elections, and I’d rather impeachment remain a scarecrow.

Hey, guess what? Radiation is forever. From The Independent:



The radioactive material is thought to be from Chernobyl and is not linked to a radioactive cloud that developed in southern Russia last month, officials from the French nuclear safety institute IRSN said. Custom officials stopped a 3.5 tonne shipment of mushrooms contaminated with caesium 137, a waste product of nuclear reactors. A spokesperson for IRSN said: “As the mushrooms came from Belarus, it is very likely the contamination originated in Chernobyl.”

The disaster at the reactor in Chernobyl happened 31 years ago. Don’t eat stuff from there, OK?

It’s very good to be a wealthy Republican donor in Wisconsin these days. The U.S. Senate is going to let you deduct the maintenance on your private jet and the state will build you an airport for it. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:



A tiny airport in central Wisconsin that’s seen an influx of private jets since a Republican donor’s world-class golf course opened nearby would get $4 million in improvements under funding slipped into the state budget this week. The Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee approved the funding after the developer of the Sand Valley Golf Resort, Michael Keiser, donated $25,000 to the state Republican Party in February, records reviewed by The Associated Press show. That donation was three weeks after Gov. Scott Walker released his budget without funding for Wisconsin Rapids’ Alexander Field. Keiser has given at least $65,000 to Walker and Wisconsin Republicans since 2012. “It sure looks like Mr. Keiser’s campaign contributions to Scott Walker and Republicans teed up millions in taxpayer-funded improvements to help bring corporate jet ferried golfers to his Wisconsin courses,” said Mike Browne with the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now. “Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to have to deal with crumbling roads and bridges and delayed projects as these same Republicans take a budget mulligan and refuse to fix the state transportation funding crisis.”

I don’t normally wish the shanks on any of my fellow humans but I hope this cat doesn’t find a fairway for the next 10 years.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “That’s A Plenty” (Sweet Emma Barrett): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s the new Russian ambassador arriving in Great Britain in 1928. Except that, as the information below the video indicates, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had severed diplomatic ties in 1928, so this guy could be anybody and he could be arriving anywhere. Is Michael Flynn in one of those carriages? History is so cool.

The State House here in the Commonwealth (God Save It) is in an uproar because the husband of the Senate president has been accused of sexual harassment by four different men. From The Boston Globe via MassLive:

The Globe story, based on interviews with 20 people "who have dealt with Hefner or know his alleged victims," details incidents in 2015 and 2016. In one alleged incident described to the Globe, one man, who like the others asked the Globe for anonymity, said Hefner grabbed his genitals while they were together in back of a Prius, while Rosenberg sat in the front of the vehicle.

The Senate president, Stan Rosenberg, who represents a district in that part of the Commonwealth (God save it!) that we call “out past Worcester,” already has called for an independent investigation into the charges against his husband. This is not the way you want to go into the holidays.

There was a lively discussion on the electric Twitter machine the other night about the origins of the term “throwing some shade.” I admit I was someone who thought it was of very recent vintage, something the kidz said when I wasn’t looking. Then, lo and behold, somebody found Charles Dickens using it in 1851. Then somebody else found a historian using it in 1815. And then somebody else found Jane Austen beating that historian’s time by a full year. Twitter is the best thing ever. Hey, it was better than thinking about the tax bill.



Is it a good day for dinosaur news, National Geographic? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

In a world first, paleontologists working in northwestern China have discovered a cache of hundreds of ancient eggs laid by pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs. Some of the eggs contain the most detailed pterosaur embryos ever found. Although scientists have studied pterosaurs for more than two centuries, no eggs were discovered until the early 2000s, and fewer than a dozen turned up in the intervening years. The new haul, discovered by Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Xiaolin Wang, includes at least 215—and perhaps as many as 300— stunningly preserved pterosaur eggs. His team also found 16 embryos within the eggs, and they suspect that more remain locked away in the stone. Wang and his colleagues announced the finds today in Science.

Perfectly preserved pterosaur embryos? You don’t think…nope, sorry.

As the waters raged on that ancient Chinese lake, many of the pterosaur eggs split open, letting in sediments that ultimately preserved their oblong shapes. And in at least 16 of these eggs, the sediments also cradled the delicate skeletons of developing pterosaur embryos, including one bone that the team thinks belonged to a hatchling.

Nevertheless, this was an astonishing find and further proof that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee was fairly sure that our post about whether or not the president* was unspooling in the cabeza would provide us our Top Commenter of the Week, but The Committee was surprised that Top Commenter Alfred McCloud was willing to take the Caligula analogy to its logical conclusion.

He's Caligula with a double dose of lead.

Can't wait till he appoints his golf cart, transportation secretary.

Bravo and Incitatus to you, my good man. Here are 81.19 Beckhams. Try not to appoint any of them.

I’ll be in D.C. at the beginning of next week to watch the Nine Wise Souls hear the cases of gambling on NCAA events and on gay cake-making. God knows what else might happen while I’m down there. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or your pizza’s coming with extra glowing mushrooms.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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