A. President Trump Violated His Oath of Office
Every President swears an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States”[1] and assumes the constitutional duty to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.”[2] Impeachment is a safeguard against Presidents who violate that oath (and betray that duty) by using the powers of their office to advance their own personal political interests at the expense of the Nation. In particular, the Framers of the Constitution feared a President who would corrupt his office by sparing “no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.”[3]
President Trump’s effort to extend his grip on power by fomenting violence against Congress was a profound violation of the oath he swore. If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a Joint Session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be. The Framers themselves would not have hesitated to convict on these facts. Their worldview was shaped by a study of classical history, as well as a lived experience of resistance and revolution. They were well aware of the danger posed by opportunists who incited mobs to violence for political gain. They drafted the Constitution to avoid such thuggery, which they associated with “the threat of civil disorder and the early assumption of power by a dictator.”[4] James Madison thus worked “to avoid the fate of those ‘ancient and modern confederacies,’ which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.”[5] The Federalist Papers, too, strongly
- ↑ U.S. Const., Art. II, § 1, cl. 8.
- ↑ U.S. Const., Art. II, §§ 1, 3.
- ↑ 2 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 64 (Max Farrand ed., 1911) (Farrand).
- ↑ Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 282 (1967).
- ↑ Jeffrey Rosen, American is Living James Madison’s Nightmare, The Atlantic (October 2018).
