Trump has passed the threshold for impeachment

Some weeks ago, when the Trump disaster was emerging, I wrote that Madison and the other Framers had failed to provide a ready method of expelling unfit presidents. With the gathering misdeeds, this omission has grown ever more costly. In a parliamentary system Trump wouldn’t have survived his first vote of confidence — assuming that he could have reached the office in the first place.

The founders did equip the Constitution with an impeachment process borrowed from English law. The article is succinct, mentioning treason, bribery and other “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Because it seems to exempt the process from criminal indictment, impeachment was clearly intended to be a civil procedure. Yet history has weighed it down with legalisms.

When people of my vintage studied American history, it was conventional wisdom that Andrew Johnson’s narrow escape from ouster was a Good Thing — had he not prevailed, it was said, presidential authority would have been gravely impaired. It would have spelled the end of “presidential government” as designed in the age of Washington. There was truth in the conventional wisdom, but the effect was to minimize the civil (non-legalistic) uses of Impeachment.

It required the capture of the White House by an grossly unqualified and self-serving amateur to dramatize the shallowness of the conventional wisdom -- now daily echoed in cable TV “media” with its half-baked legalistic prattle (“obstruction of justice” being the overwhelming favorite).

Many are hoping that Robert Mueller, the latest special prosecutor, will come up with a solution, but he is as torpid as his predecessors. Experience teaches that special prosecutors tend to wander the legal landscape in search of a “crime,” the most ridiculous being Starr’s quest for a petty lie about a shabby episode of consensual sex. Mueller may prove an exception. Meanwhile, he is poking along while Trump continues to do reckless damage to the national interest in a lengthening train of abuses, accompanied by juvenile insults to anyone who get in his way.

In the unlikely event that it fell my lot to draw up impeachment articles, it would be easy -- to wit:

He has told, by reliable count, more than 5,000 lies in two-plus years, debasing a standard of truth-telling essential to government by consent. To call him a compulsive perjurer would be gross understatement.

He has disrupted and/or scrapped valuable security agreements, treaties and alliances, dismaying friends and rejoicing foes.

He has imposed tariffs essential to US trade and agriculture, to their loss.

He has appointed an array of subordinates who are, or will be, in trouble with the law.

He has placed self-interested officials in charge of interests they are supposed to regulate.

He carries on his private businesses via family surrogates, possibly in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

He ignores, defies and scoffs at the seasoned advice of military and intelligence officials.

All this, just for beginners - and there is doubtless more. This indictment will require analysis and adjudication in the Senate; but conviction of any significant charge suffices for ejection; and if impeachment functioned as it should Donald Trump would be out on his ear. And good riddance.

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is retired after a career as an editor and writer in Washington, D.C.