Expert analyzes the rise of impeachment as a weapon of partisan politics

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• John Yang:

  House Republicans are pressing ahead with their efforts to impeach both President Biden and his homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. If the house approves articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden, it would be the fifth presidential impeachment in the nation's history. Three of them coming in just the last five years.

  Only one cabinet official has ever been impeached and that was in 1876. There's also talk among some Republican lawmakers of impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland and defense secretary Lloyd Austin has what was intended to be a check on presidential power become a modern day political weapon.

  Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at the George Washington University. Sarah, all that's going on right now, is this what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he suggested or argued that impeachment should be in the Constitution?

• Sarah Binder, George Washington University:

  Impeachment has had a long political history, and even the framers were a little worried about how it would be used. In fact, it might be the only one thing that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed on, right. They worried that a party a large majority could weaponize it against their opponents.

  It does seem to be though that in today's recent years, it's been used as a threat, even if sometimes they never get to vote. And that seems quite a bit different than what we've seen before.

• John Yang:

  I want to talk about the Mayorkas impeachment inquiry. The chairman of that effort is Mark Green is Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. And he defended this process in an in a hearing earlier this week.

  Rep. Mark Green, Chairman, House Committee on Homeland Security: The constitutional history is overwhelmingly clear on this subject. The founders designed impeachment not just to remove officials engaged in criminal behavior. But those guilty of such gross incompetence that their conduct had endangered their fellow Americans betrayed the public trust or represented a neglect of duty.

• John Yang:

  On the other hand, you had a group of legal scholars write an open letter degree in saying that impeachment wasn't intended to cover incompetence, poor judgment or bad policy. They said it was for truly extraordinary misconduct.

  And on the third hand, you had Gerald Ford in the 1970s, when he was trying to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who said, an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is at any given time, what's your take on this?

• Sarah Binder:

  Well, there's a kernel of truth to Representative Green's argument that the framers said it shouldn't just be a standard of actual criminal misconduct. But at the same time, the letter writers, the legal experts are correct.

  In fact, the framers explicitly rejected this term mal (ph) administration, right, would essentially boil down to policy differences, that that was too low of a threshold, that that shouldn't be the basis of impeachment. Does that leave us with our President Ford, but a majority is willing to support in some ways that's what it boils down to.

• John Yang:

  You talked about earlier when the debate over this impeachment clause at the time the Constitution was being written. Hamilton said at the time that when impeachment happened, it would inevitably become political that the country would be divided into camps for and against.

  Are we seeing politics not being an effect of impeachment, but being what's driving impeachment now?

• Sarah Binder:

  Well, there's a certain truth to that way of thinking about it, which is to say we live in an inherently an intensely partisan time. And there's very little that escapes this sort of seeping partisanship, this partisan team play in Washington, right, your team's forte, so my team is against it.

  And in some ways, impeachment and threats of impeachment is just another tool in the majority's. toolbook. Of course, you know, we have very tight majorities, very slim majorities, and you can't impeach somebody with a simple majority. You can't convict them that is. And so it festers right partisanship as it spreads. So soon, we get more and more of these threats, to impeach someone over policy differences.

• John Yang:

  Does that devalue the impact or the import of impeachment?

• Sarah Binder:

  Well, there's always a risk here, that as more and more the threat of impeachment is wielded. And presidents don't fear conviction, because we rarely ever see two-thirds majorities which are needed to convict the president and remove him from office. We rarely see those oversized bipartisan majorities.

  The risk then is that impeachment which might have been used and perceived as a way to constrain presidents in their exercise of power, that that's not going to work to constrain those presidents anymore in that I think the framers might not be surprised. But I think they'd be a little quite a bit worried about.

• John Yang:

  What are the risks or the dangers of the pitfalls of that?

• Sarah Binder:

  Well, first of all, there's the sense and we can look to recent, former President Trump, right, there's the risk here that presidents feel unconstrained. That is they only feel beholden to their party base. They might only feel beholden to the set of voters who can get them reelected.

  Now, that's not unique to one party or the other. But the danger here is, if you don't fear any constraint from the Senate, or from the United States conduct, you can violate the public trust, you can abuse your power, knowing that there's very little that stands in your way.

  And that can be harmful. It can be harmful for national security. It can be harmful for social welfare. There's all sorts of ways in which the American public and that's sort of the strength of a democratic system relies on holding politicians accountable for how they wield power.

• John Yang:

  Is this a product of this particular moment in American politics? Or do you think the use of the attitude toward impeachment has really shifted forever?

• Sarah Binder:

  Well, again, there are deep roots to this partisan and political use of impeachment all the way back right to 1789 and the early, early impeachment efforts in the early 1800s. So I don't want to overstate the uniqueness of the moment here.

  But there is something different I think, going on here. Certainly, it seems in this Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, which is in the past, leaders seem to be able to kind of constrain their members, constrain the hardliners who really want to go after the other party's president or his cabinet.

  These had two speakers of this Congress, neither has really been willing or able to rein in their hardliners. And in fact, it seems speakers are trying to get out ahead of the parade, that maybe impeachment is the one thing that will unite their party. And that's seems quite a bit new to me historically.

• John Yang:

  Sarah Binder of George Washington University, thank you very much.

• Sarah Binder:

  Sure. Thanks for having me.