Political process no less serious than judicial
Extra allotment potentially could include doses from Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson
After three presidential impeachments, I’ve seen enough to conclude that one of the worst things about them is the lawyers. Even among some of my favorite legal commentators the problem is the same. They say something like: “Of course impeachment trials aren’t criminal proceedings. Impeachment is a political process.”
And then, often in the next breath, they’ll say stuff like: “This wouldn’t work in court,” or, “The legal standard for incitement is a very high bar.”
This is a bipartisan phenomenon, manifesting itself among lawyers (and the politicians who defer to them) whether they favor or oppose impeachment. To a certain extent this is understandable. Impeachment involves a bunch of legalistic buzzwords: “high crimes and misdemeanors,” “due process,” “trial,” “conviction” and, of course, “constitutional” — i.e., lawyer talk. If, somehow, impeachment involved terms like “fulcrum,” “cantilever” or “modulus of elasticity,” engineers would probably feel entitled to dominate the debate.
The problem is that all of this legalistic talk spills into and infects an inherently political process, turning a mechanism of self-government into an episode of “Perry Mason.” Calling something a political process doesn’t make it less serious than a judicial one.
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau once said that war is too important a thing to entrust to the generals. He didn’t mean generals were irrelevant, just that the question of going to war was ultimately one of political statesmanship, not technical expertise. Thus, in the U.S. framework, declaring war is properly left to Congress.
For similar reasons, Congress has the impeachment power. It is also too important to leave to the lawyers.
In a criminal court, if you’re found guilty of inciting lethal insurrection, you go to jail. In an impeachment trial, if you’re found guilty of the same charge, you lose your job. Or, in Donald Trump’s case, the ability to hold it ever again. That’s it.
And yet, defenders of impeached presidents make it sound as if the highest principles of justice, the Constitution and the rule of law are at stake if the president isn’t afforded the full benefit of criminal legal standards.
It’s all nonsense. For instance, in their defense brief, Trump’s lawyers claim that his remarks egging on the crowd Jan. 6 are protected under the First Amendment. They’re probably right. But so what?
The president of a corporation has every freedom to go on TV to declare that his company’s products are defective. But the board of his company could — and would — fire him according to whatever procedure they liked. If the head of the Smithsonian invited a mob to protest outside the Air and Space Museum and the mob ransacked the place because of lies he told them, the regents wouldn’t await a legal verdict before firing him.
The Senate is like a board of trustees for the government. The Constitution gives the senators the authority to conduct impeachment trials as they see fit, subject to a handful of procedural rules. Even the judges in impeachment trials don’t function as judges would in a regular court; the Senate can overrule their decisions.
My analogy, while imperfect, is useful because impeachment is about self-government, not criminal behavior. Yes, crimes can be impeachable, but as James Madison explained, impeachable acts don’t have to be criminal.
We all understand that private and most public institutions have every right to police the professional conduct of their officers. Why the standards for CEOs, museum curators or Little League coaches should be so much higher than for presidents is a mystery to me. In almost every other realm of life, leaders are held to account not just to the law, but to notions of leadership, common sense and maturity we expect from responsible adults.
And yet, when it comes to the president, rigid legal casuistry suddenly defines what constitutes minimum standards of permissible conduct. You can say the presidency is different because it’s the one office the whole country votes on. Fine. But shouldn’t that be an even greater argument for applying standards of statesmanship, not criminal law? The Founding Fathers thought so, which is why they made the Senate, not any court, the means by which we render judgment on such conduct.
But to listen to most of Trump’s defenders in the Senate — or Bill Clinton’s defenders in the 1990s — the last thing that should be weighed is statesmanship, never mind decency or maturity. They’d rather hide behind spurious legalisms rather than take their jobs or the facts seriously.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced more COVID vaccine doses could soon come to Florida, potentially including more doses of the Pfizer vaccine and even the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Appearing at a community center in Venice on Wednesday, the governor said that more of Florida’s allotment — at least for now — will go to counties where fewer seniors have been vaccinated. On Wednesday, that was Sarasota County. Venice will get 3,000 doses to give out to seniors at a state-run site, and Walmart could soon give doses out at some of its Sarasota County pharmacies.
“As vaccines come in we’re getting it to places that need it and can use it,” DeSantis said, adding that he believes the existing vaccines will be effective against the UK variant that has appeared in the state.
Some believe a race is on to vaccinate enough people in the state before the UK variant becomes the dominant strain. Florida has the highest number of the highly contagious UK variant and scientists worry it could spread fast before enough people get vaccinated. DeSantis said the state received 325,000 doses of the vaccine this week, more than what the federal government had provided per week in January.
The Biden administration implemented a national strategy to combat the COVID19 pandemic that includes increasing the vaccine supply to states. The administration also announced the first phase of the federal