In the Impeachment Battle, It’s the Democrats vs. the Constitution
As Mark Twain said, there’s a big difference between “lightning bug” and “lightning.” That is, if you simply chop off the last part of a name or a phrase, you can get something completely different. To put that another way, if one engages in that sort of chopping, one can change not only the wording but also the meaning.
Okay, so now to an immediate example of language-chopping, one that’s been happening in real time: Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak caught it on December 3 when he tweeted, “The Schiff #impeachment report quotes George Mason during the [1787] Constitutional Convention–without noting that his proposal for ‘maladministration’ as a basis for impeachment was rejected.”
So we can see: By recalling Mason’s definition of impeachment, back in the 18th century, but not recalling that Mason’s definition was rejected at the time, the Democrats are doing some misleading language-chopping. To put the matter politely, in so chopping, they are doing a disservice to the historical record — and therefore to the truth.
So let’s take a closer look at this bit of slipperiness.
George Mason, of course, was one of the Founders gathered at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, 232 years ago. The Virginia-born Mason was a highly regarded lawyer and scholar, and yet he was also an outlier — and thus his suggestion that impeachment could be made on the basis of “maladministration” was rejected.
Instead, in Article Two, Section Four, the Founders stipulated that impeachment would be reserved for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” As we can readily see, words such as “Treason” impose a much higher standard on impeachment than mere “maladministration.”
In fact, not only was Mason less-than-happy about the outcome of that definitional argument about impeachment, he wasn’t happy with the Constitution overall. Thus he was one of only three delegates to the Philadelphia Convention who refused to sign the document before it went to the 13 states for ratification; the Constitution was, in fact, ratified nine months later.
In other words, our sacred founding document, drafted by James Madison, was good enough for George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton — but not good enough for George Mason.
Happily, Mason was free to follow his conscience, and yet today, in our time, it’s highly disingenuous for Schiff and the House Democrats to cite Mason as the source of a proper definition of an impeachable offense, when not only was Mason’s definition of impeachment rejected, but the Constitution itself was rejected by Mason.
Indeed, we might ask ourselves: What would have happened, these past 230 years, if “maladministration” had been the standard? Is there any U.S. president who couldn’t have been accused, at one time or another during his tenure in office, of maladministration?
In fact, if one sets the bar of impeachment low enough, it could become the equivalent of a “no confidence” vote in a parliament. Such no-confidence votes happen all the time in parliamentary systems — and when they happen, the prime minister falls.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/13/virgil-impeachment-battle-democrats-vs-constitution/