Save Our Political System: Impeach and Convict Joe Biden

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we get. To avoid getting what we’re increasingly likely to get, Congress should impeach and convict President Biden.

 

Evidently, Biden feels as if there are no consequences to violating his oath of office. Last August, Biden “double, triple, quadruple checked” whether he was allowed to order another moratorium on evictions without Congress, and he concluded that he was not. Then he did it anyway — on the outrageous grounds that the time it would take to litigate might allow him “to keep this going for a month, at least — I hope longer.” Last Wednesday, Biden pulled the same trick with student loans. That the president does not have the statutory power to “cancel” college loans has long been so obvious that even Nancy Pelosi has managed to acknowledge it. “The president can’t do it, that’s not even a discussion,” Pelosi said last year. “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness.” But, she confirmed: “He does not.” A week ago, Biden did it anyway — with the help of what might be the single most cynical and embarrassing legal memorandum in modern American history.

 

And why wouldn’t he, given that presidents have started to get away with such behavior as a matter of routine? In 2012, President Obama told audience after audience that he couldn’t “suspend deportations through executive order,” “because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed.” Those “laws on the books by Congress,” Obama said more than 20 times, “are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system.” “I’m not a king,” Obama said. “I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he noted. “There is a path to get this done and that is through Congress,” he insisted. And then he did it anyway.

 

And nothing happened.

 

In 2019, Donald Trump followed suit. Exasperated by his repeated inability to convince the Democratic Congress to appropriate funds for his border wall, Trump announced that he’d discovered some emergency laws on the books that, conveniently enough, allowed him to go it alone. Trump then took $6.5 billion from the Treasury.

 

And nothing happened.

 

Complaining about Trump’s unilateralism, the Brennan Center noted that Trump’s pivot had been executed “for the express purpose of subvert­ing the will of Congress” and warned the public of the “dangers that would be posed by allow­ing Trump’s declar­a­tion to stand.” The Brennan Center was correct. Only three years have elapsed since those words were written, and, inspired by the lack of meaningful accountability that he has now watched two presidents enjoy, Trump’s successor just took a set of illegal actions so enormous in scale as to beggar belief. Trump stole $6.5 billion. Joe Biden has just taken between 100 and 200 times that figure. What sort of “danger,” I must ask, might be “posed” by allowing that “declaration to stand?”

 

There is not a single person in America who believes that what President Biden has done is legal — and that includes the people who penned the contrived legal justifications for him. His order is a ruse, a scheme, a hijacking — the product not of genuine ambiguity in the law, but of a preference for brute force. I know it. You know it. We all know it. President Biden knows it. This is why, in almost taunting tones, the president’s apologists have begun to remind the dissenters that, under the current standing rules, there may be no person in America who can sue. “Well,” they ask, gleefully, “Whatjagonnadoaboutit?”

 

I’ll tell you what I’d do about it: I’d impeach and convict the president, and end this trend for good. In this country, Congress makes the laws. In this country, Congress appropriates the funds. In this country, Congress sets immigration policy. In this country, as Barack Obama liked to remind us, the president is not a dictator or an emperor or a king. In this country, there is a path to getting things done, and that path is through Congress.

 

And if the president doesn’t like that? Then the president can go home. Among the many scars that Woodrow Wilson left on the American system of government, we can count the notion that the three branches of government are “co-equal.” They’re not. Congress is prime. Congress can pass laws without the president; the president cannot pass laws without Congress. Congress can remove the president; the president cannot remove Congress. Along with the states, Congress can amend the Constitution; the president cannot. Look at any part of the American order, and you’ll find that Congress has the power either to veto the other branches or to change the status quo via other means.

 

Last January, Congress should have used this power to impeach and convict President Trump for engaging in what Senator Ben Sasse appropriately described as “one of the most egregious Article II attacks on Article I in all of U.S. history.” A decade ago, Congress should have used this power to impeach Barack Obama for relentlessly explaining that he wasn’t an emperor, and then taking the very action he had deemed a usurpation of legislative authority. Today, Congress should use this power to remove Joe Biden from office for repeatedly breaking his oath in the most transparent way imaginable. And if we don’t — because it’s too hard or too divisive or harrowing — then we’ll deserve the system we’ll inevitably end up with, which, at this rate, seems destined to bear an uncanny resemblance to the system we once fought a revolution to pull apart.