Objections to Impeachment, Part 1: The Specter of Abuse
Abuse is bound to happen with any government power, but that isn't a real objection against providing the power to impeach federal officials.
House Judiciary Committee hearings on whether impeachment proceedings should begin against President Bill Clinton October 5, 1998 in Washington, DC (Richard Ellis / Alamy Stock Photo). The Liquidation of Meaning: Madisonian Originalism for the Living Generation
The Constitution was intended to exist into remote futurity, and as a foundation for popular government each generation must commit itself to its principles.
Responses
Gordon Lloyd and Steve Ealy provide considerable material to ponder. The gist of their argument seems to be that rather than a Progressive political culture centered on quadrennial presidential elections and a governmental system featuring a considerable policy-making authority for both the president and the Supreme Court, we ought to prefer a “Madisonian” system. While…
It is subtle, or at least ironic, to use a term—“liquidate”—that has lost its original meaning to initiate a discussion of constitutional interpretation. Today the word still has a legal usage, referring to the payment and settlement of debts. The OED finds that meaning in English publications at the time that Madison and Hamilton employed…
Gordon Lloyd and Steve Ealy make a compelling case for liquidation, what they call “Originalism for the Living Generation,” as the most Madisonian means of settling constitutional meaning. Grounded as it is in Madisonian text and example, from The Federalist to the bank veto, the superb account Lloyd and Ealy offer is difficult to assail…
Ditching the Filibuster Won’t Save the Senate
Entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building The Senate is broken, but eliminating the filibuster is only likely to exacerbate the underlying causes of the institution’s dysfunction.
This is not the conventional wisdom, of course, which maintains that it’s excessive minority obstruction that makes the Senate unable to pass important legislation. Proponents of this view point to the gridlock that results from the filibuster. And behind it they see ideological and partisan polarization, geographic sorting of the electorate, and the prevalence of special interest money in campaigns.
Madison and the Liquid Constitution
The conversation Richard Reinsch has sparked on constitutional liquidation is less about constitutional meaning than about the ultimate—note “ultimate”—authority to ascertain it. It is true, as Randy Barnett, among others, notes, that liquidation is a longstanding topic in originalist thought. But Reinsch suggests a new avenue, writing that republican politics bien entendu is the ultimate (see above) expositor of constitutional meaning and that this is true generally, not just in ambiguous or indeterminate cases.
Investigating Madison’s Political Religion
In the preface of James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection, Jeremy D. Bailey mentions in an aside that he will not speak of Madison’s theory of religious liberty; yet the entire text that follows is taken up with a discussion of Madison’s religion. I do not mean that Bailey scours Madison’s corpus for evidence of Christian faith or that he seeks, to the contrary, to prove once and for all that the Founders were religious skeptics. He makes no inquiry of the sort. Rather, he investigates what I consider Madison’s political religion. He points, using Madison’s language, to the U.S. Constitution as…
