A panoply of leftist pundits and mainstream media mouthpieces (but I repeat myself) have taken to calling, in recent days, for President Trump’s impeachment due to the latest purported scandal in which the president has found himself embroiled: Ukraine-gate.
Holding aside any discussion of what may or may not have actually transpired on the underlying phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, two things are true here at once. As the inestimable Angelo Codevilla properly noted last week at American Greatness: “The president’s authority over national security information is more than broad. It is total. All who exercise such authority do so on his behalf and by his leave.” Constitutional law scholars refer to this as “unitary executive theory,” and the fact that all of the executive branch’s constitutional power sits with the president himself flows directly from the plain text of the Article II Vesting Clause itself: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” At the same time, impeachment in the American constitutional system is a political, and not criminal, remedy. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment of a president may be properly considered for all “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
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