An impeachment of the president is upon us.

It should not be.

Instead, now is the time for a grand gesture of healing from both sides. The president should declare that he will not run for reelection and the Democrats should abandon their paper-thin case for impeachment. A mutual withdrawal is not impossible.

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The Democratic candidate who has the courage to put the needs of the country ahead of vainglory will be the winner in the Democratic sweepstakes. As for the Republicans, those who share the substantive aims of President Trump Donald John TrumpBiden says voters should choose who nominates Supreme Court justice Trump, Biden will not shake hands at first debate due to COVID-19 Pelosi: Trump Supreme Court pick 'threatens' Affordable Care Act MORE, but without all of the baggage of epithet and anger, can begin the rescue of the Grand Old Party within the principled pragmatism of Lincoln.

These actions will remember a time when working together was good and when our togetherness inspired more than what any one of us could do alone. This was the challenge given to the graduating classes of Notre Dame by the late Father Theodore Hesburgh. It is this particular challenge that confronts the nation on the brink of impeachment and, then, the prospect of a Senate trial.

I am not a Trump supporter. Like the majority of voters in 2016, I anticipated that Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonThe Memo: Trump furor stokes fears of unrest Bloomberg rolls out M ad buy to boost Biden in Florida Hillicon Valley: Productivity, fatigue, cybersecurity emerge as top concerns amid pandemic | Facebook critics launch alternative oversight board | Google to temporarily bar election ads after polls close MORE was destined to be our first female president — but a funny thing happened on the way to the Oval Office. Really, it was not funny at all but tragic.

When I served as President Reagan’s constitutional legal counsel, the independent counsel methodology was in its infancy. Even if the law had some theoretical merit, from the beginning its application was disastrous. It was a serious misapplication of the independent counsel rubric to apply it to President Clinton, and it is an equally serious misapplication to apply it to President Trump.

These misapplications have poisoned our system. They effectively criminalize the separation of powers. In doing that, they weaken the strong bones of constitutional direction given by the Founders, by depriving that lasting blueprint of governing structure of the various means of hydraulic pressure and release needed to get things done. It is the very “Ambition checking Ambition” that slows abuse and yields the competing ideas to advance the betterment of American life and, indeed, life around the world.

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But at this moment, on the precipice of impeachment, we are at a point where all but a few are incapable of hearing opposing arguments. We know only how to chastise, not how to build. We have no sense of the good work that any president intends when we always hold him in great suspicion. We have become a country that divides power — not for the sake of protecting our liberty, but for the sake of personal self-aggrandizement.

What to do? Unanimously reject the impeachment articles against Donald Trump. The two articles are quite amorphous and far less serious than the matters discussed comprehensively in the Mueller report. At a proper time, with proper motivation and evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, what was found in the Mueller report may be applied to the president’s past actions once he has completed his service in office. That is what the Founders intended; the possibility of criminal prosecution after office was the compromise reached to ensure that everyone is under the law while not disrupting the full-time attention of a president from public matters.

Donald Trump is not free from legal scrutiny, in office or upon leaving office. That said, disagreement over policy, over perspective, is not a basis for removal or indictment. It is, as the president has opined, a stark distortion of constitutional intent.

I have been in my life a Democrat, a Republican and an independent. Some of that experience was quixotic, some of it was quite practical, and some of it was idealistic. That is what makes our country great. We should not long keep a mechanism — such as the incendiary independent counsel practice — that makes impossible those conversations and the prospect of action urged out of compromise and good faith.

It is time for the grand gesture: Presidential withdrawal from 2020, matched by the Democrats’ withdrawal of their relentless prosecutorial mindset — or, if you will, withdrawal from the poisonous fruit of an ill-considered independent counsel inquiry that, if not for the wisdom of special counsel Robert Mueller Robert (Bob) MuellerCNN's Toobin warns McCabe is in 'perilous condition' with emboldened Trump CNN anchor rips Trump over Stone while evoking Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting The Hill's 12:30 Report: New Hampshire fallout MORE, would have permanently distorted the rule of law and rendered it impossible for any president to do the people’s business.

Democrats dropping the impeachment process, and identifying it as the product of an independent counsel mentality that is fundamentally at odds with what the Founders anticipated, would go a long way toward the careful interweaving of the separation of powers to make a government that is both free and workable.

Douglas Kmiec served as the U.S. ambassador to Malta from 2009 to 2011 and headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is the emeritus Caruso Family Chair in Human Rights at Pepperdine University School of Law, and founding editor of the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy. Follow him on Twitter @dougkmiec.