Framers weren’t fools; former president can be impeached
WASHINGTON – Not long ago, it was common on the right for people to call themselves constitutional conservatives. But that, evidently, was a fad. Now the supporters of former President Donald Trump want us to believe the Framers were fools.
How else to understand their interpretation of impeachment? The main argument of Trump’s lawyers – repeated ad nauseam in their written response to the House trial brief at the start of the Senate trial on Tuesday – was that their client could no longer be impeached because he is no longer president. “The constitutional provision,” they wrote, “requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached.”
The absurdities of this claim abound. The Constitution specifies two possible punishments the Senate can impose upon impeachment conviction: removal from office and disqualification from future office. The second penalty is always and only imposed on former officials, since they have just been removed from their job. And there is nothing in the text of the Constitution that requires the imposition of both punishments in every case.
The Trump team’s version of impeachment would leave the process easily gamed. Why wouldn’t every official facing the likelihood of conviction simply resign from office 10 minutes before the Senate votes? Yes, the official would lose office (by an act of his or her own will). But wouldn’t this make the second punishment – disqualification from future office – impossible to impose?
Think on this a moment. If only current officeholders can be impeached and convicted, only those officials who feel confident of Senate acquittal would choose to remain in office until the vote. The incentive structure of this system would be perverse. As a practical matter, disqualification would be imposed only on officials who think they have a chance at Senate acquittal, decide to risk a vote and then lose. Those who are confident of Senate conviction would always avoid disqualification by strategically resigning. The worst offenders would never face the full range of penalties.
Trump incited the insurrection two weeks before the end of his term, in the hope that his time in office would be unconstitutionally extended. Yet his lawyers have been shameless enough to criticize “the House of Representatives’ rush to judgment” on impeachment.
Many Republican senators seem to be clinging to this weak procedural case because they do not want to confront the reality of what happened on Jan. 6.
The Capitol attack was not merely the work of an unstable, departed leader. All the mayhem and bloodshed were the triumph of a certain kind of politics that continues and strengthens under Trump’s direction.
It was the natural outworking of an apocalyptic politics. We need to “fight like hell,” Trump told the assembled crowd in Washington, D.C., or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
It was the logical consequence of a politics based on lies. “States want to correct their votes,” Trump informed his supporters on Twitter. “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN.”
It was the natural outcome of a politics infected with conspiracy theories. Shadowy forces, Trump maintained, were responsible for the “biggest SCAM in our nation’s history.”
It was the culmination of a militarized rhetoric, in which Trump has urged his followers to view politics as an “act of war” and to “fight to the death.”
Only one decision in the Senate trial will hold a guilty man accountable, while taking a stand for a better, nobler political ideal. And there is no plausible, procedural argument that will rescue senators from the moral choice they face.
Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist.
michaelgerson@washpost.com.
Coal production levels are continuing to plummet each year in Ohio, a trajectory that has accelerated during the pandemic.
“The overall use of energy has decreased a great deal. It’s just further depressed the market, which was already depressed by price,” Mike Cope, president of the Ohio Coal Association, said during a recent Ohio Reclamation Forfeiture Fund Advisory Board meeting.
As of Jan. 30, Ohio produced 301 short tons of coal so far this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is a 33.2% decrease compared with the same period in 2020. Records show coal production in Ohio has steadily dropped each year.
“The market is weak, and COVID has just made the market weaker,” Cope said.
The industry has faced challenges as demand for coal dwindles and more companies shift to cleaner fuels. All of this has happened as renewable sources of energy become more affordable. President Joe Biden plans to guide the country to 100% clean energy with zero emissions in the electricity sector by 2035.
Ohio’s reclamation fund collects money from coal-mining companies by charging a severance tax of 14 cents on each ton of coal mined. Companies also pay $2,500 for each acre mined.
However, with lower coal production, it means less money is going into the fund.
“We were seeing a 50% to 60% decrease,” Dave Crow, chief of Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Mineral Resources Management, said during the meeting. “We’re projecting that trend to continue for the next quarter. It’s pretty striking.”
The state’s fund is in place to reclaim mining sites if companies fail to follow through with remediating them. The last forfeiture that relied on the state fund was in 2014.
As of Feb. 1, the fund’s balance was listed at $25.6 million.
The concern is that as more coal mining companies file for bankruptcy or choose to consolidate, the fund could be depleted, leaving Ohio taxpayers to pick up the remaining tab.
The board has hired Taylor & Mulder, a property and casualty actuarial con
sulting firm, to complete a new actuarial study on the fund.
“If there are a lot of permits held by one company, then one company going belly up could mean a huge number of reclamations,” said Daniel Lupton, a specialist in predictive analytics with the Taylor & Mulder. “That could be problematic.”
In 2019, Murray Energy, which held 13 mining permits, filed for bankruptcy. Permits were transferred when the company became American Consolidated Natural Resources Inc. Had that not happened, estimates show that it would have cost more than $202 million to clean up all of the Murray mining sites.
“We've had some large firms declare bankruptcy, large coal companies in Ohio. We've gotten through all those safely,” said Sandy Ramos, legal counsel for the state's Division of Mineral Resources Management.
The latest actuarial report will factor in those scenarios.
“We'll make sure to take a look at that just so that we have it,” Lupton said. “But it'll be kind of a worst-case scenario, because it sounds like permits have been successfully transferred from bankruptcy. That's tremendous good news.”
Cope said the coal industry has hurdles ahead, including weathering stricter environmental regulations that could be forthcoming to undo Trump's
Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which did not require coal-fired power plants to pollute less.
The previous administration also stripped away protections for ephemeral streams, which flow after heavy rainfall. If they are reinstated, companies would have to protect those streams near mining sites.
Cope, who described the Biden administration as “hostile” to the coal industry said, “The problem is going to be in the next year or two if they overturn the ACE rule and vacate it. And the feds go back to the Obama policies of overregulating the streams, then that will help further erode the profitability of the coal industry and will have a very bad effect on us.” bburger@dispatch.com @Bybethburger