ET TU, ANDY?:

In writing Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment, I had a purpose: Explain that the capacity of Congress to oust a lawless president is central to the Framers' design of our governing system. Because executive power is awesome, and intended to be that way, certain abuses of it can be discouraged only by the credible threat that Congress will remove the president from power -- or, if discouragement fails, can be remediated only by the president's actual removal. That is why Madison believed that the inclusion of impeachment in Congress's arsenal was "indispensible" to preserving the Constitution's framework of liberty vouchsafed by divided power.

Abuse of the executive's power over immigration enforcement now belongs in this category of maladministration that impeachment alone can counter. One must use the qualifier "now" because this was not always the case. Immigration enforcement was originally a state responsibility. Washington has supplanted the states since the early 20th century, an erosion of federalism largely responsible for our current immigration crisis. [...]

As Faithless Execution elaborates, "high crimes and misdemeanors," the Constitution's trigger for impeachment, is a term of art for abuses of power that violate the president's fiduciary obligations to the American people he serves, the constitutional system he takes an oath to preserve, and the laws whose faithful execution is his core duty. High crimes and misdemeanors are not -- or at least, not necessarily -- the same as "crimes" and "misdemeanors" prosecutable in the courts. Impeachment is a political remedy (i.e., the removal of political authority), not a legal one (i.e., the removal of liberty after criminal indictment and conviction). That is why Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described impeachable offenses as "political" in nature -- as "proceed[ing] from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust." [...]

This is the theme of Faithless Execution: All Americans who aspire to sustain a nation of laws not men have a vital interest in rejecting executive lawlessness. The Framers understood that presidential usurpation of lawmaking power would be the road to tyranny. They were right . . . and avoiding tyranny should not be a partisan issue.

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