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The president led a conspiracy to use American foreign policy for his personal benefit. We’ve known that much for weeks. Yesterday, we heard a credible accusation that the vice president, among other top officials, was aware of the conspiracy and evidently did nothing to stop it.
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Imagine for a moment that congressional Republicans were willing to make good on the oath they have all taken to defend the Constitution. In that scenario (fanciful, I realize), both President Trump and Vice President Pence would be at risk of being impeached and removed. This combination would then create a new and separate political crisis.
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Why? Because the second person in the presidential line of succession, after the vice president, is the speaker of the House, who is of course currently a Democrat — Nancy Pelosi. If both Trump and Pence were removed from office, Pelosi would become president, flipping partisan control of the White House and the executive branch.
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That should never happen. A scandal should be able to lead to the removal of individual officials, but it should not reverse which party won an election. “If the electorate says that such-and-such a party should have the White House for four years, it ought to have the White House for four years,” Dwight Eisenhower wisely said.
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The potential for a partisan reversal raises all kinds of problems. It creates incentives for one party to exaggerate a scandal (which, to be clear, is not happening in this case). It can also lead to more voters distrusting an impeachment process. “The whole point of having a line of succession is to ensure a smooth transition and a continuity of administration in a time of crisis,” my colleague Jesse Wegman has written. “Having a leader of the opposing party take over the White House, especially in an era of intense political polarization, would not achieve that, to put it mildly.”
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Or as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion writes: “It’s contrary to the entire structure of the constitutional system, which separates legislative from executive institutions and forces them to share powers.”
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The line of succession stems from a 1947 law, and it can be changed with a new law anytime. Pelosi and House Democrats should pass such a law as soon as possible, so that every potential successor comes from the executive branch. It would be a victory for good government — and would also send a message about the severity of Trump’s and Pence’s high crimes and misdemeanors.
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The Democratic debate |
I was pleased to see that last night’s moderators didn’t ask about Medicare — an obsessive focus of the early debates — in any of their first nine questions. Pete Buttigieg brought up the subject, and the moderators asked a few follow-up questions. But they didn’t allow Medicare to dominate the debate. They found time for climate change, voting rights, China, the wealth tax and more. Nicely done, moderators — Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Ashley Parker and Kristen Welker.
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For more on the debate, I recommend the latest installment of The Times’s “Winners and Losers” feature.
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