‘Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump’

If you’re a consistent reader of The Review, I’ll wager a guess and say that you voted for President Trump. Given the partisan nature of modern politics and the impeachment proceedings, I’ll also guess that you do not believe that President Trump should be impeached. I’ll guess again and say that you believe in Constitutional Originalism and are a strong believer in law and order. Reader, this book is written for you.

Neal Katyal, a Yale educated lawyer who has argued forty cases in front of the United States Supreme Court, a professor of law at Georgetown University, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 1991, has written a book that should be required reading for everyone participating in and affected by the impeachment process ranging from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to voters in the next election. Unlike much of the arguments surrounding the impeachment process created for public consumption, Impeach is staunchly non-partisan and reasoned. In a way, Katyal’s book is written for readers of the Review; first, it relies on arguments about the original meaning of the Constitution and, second, the idea that nobody is above the law.

One common refrain heard throughout the impeachment process has been that the term “high crimes” is not defined in the Constitution. Katyal, while conceding this, points out that the founders of the United States assumed that we would know what the term meant. Drawing from The Federalist Papers and other documents penned by our Founding Fathers, Katyal unequivocally states that high crimes refer to crimes committed against the people of the United States in the form of abusing or violating public trust. In late eighteenth-century English Law, the term “high crimes” was defined as those crimes that were “’committed against the crown in a monarchy or the people in a democracy’” and several documents from the writing of the Constitution illustrate that the term was borrowed from English Law. This is not an obscure argument. In 2008, as Katyal rightfully points out, Vice President Mike Pence gave a similar definition of high crimes in a hearing at the House Judiciary Committee.

Perhaps a metaphor would be useful to illustrate the true argumentative strength of this definition of high crimes. At Dartmouth, when someone asks you to play pong, you know you’ll be playing with paddles. To claim that one thought they meant Beirut is to be willfully ignorant of a rich cultural history, to purposely ignore convention, and—most obviously—to make a fool of yourself. If you would not walk into a frat and argue with an entire basement that the rules of pong don’t include paddles, you should not claim that high crimes are anything other than the definition given by Katyal, Vice President Pence, and our Founding Fathers. Katyal, throughout the book, draws upon substantial evidence about President Trump’s conduct with Ukraine to prove that, under the correct definition of high crimes, President Trump has wronged the American people.

Throughout Impeach, Katyal refers to a key principle for his own life and legal practice that he deems the “Yardstick Rule.” He defines the “Yardstick Rule” as the notion that everyone should be held to the same rules of conduct. Understanding the partisan nature of our modern politics, Katyal asks his readers to  “ask [themselves], in a moment of brutal honesty, what [they] would do it the political parties were reversed…if [President Obama] had done what President Trump did—if he’d ask Iran, for instance, to dig up dirt on Mitt Romney. If you are a Democrat, would you have supported impeachment? If you are a Republican, would you?” In my opinion, our elected officials have forgotten something key to the strength of our Republic: the job of any politician is to act as a public servant to our democracy. There is a reason why our Founding Fathers had a distrust and wariness of political parties. We can clearly see that playing out now. Katyal deems himself a centrist. Several times over, he stresses that it is the upmost importance for our elected officials to support the interests of our country over personal or partisan interests. Katyal stresses that impeachment should not be about anything other than protecting our democracy from foreign interference. Even using this high bar, Katyal proves time and time again that President Trump’s conduct illustrates just that. Perhaps the strongest of these arguments is his most textual: President Trump has opened himself up to bribery, “one of the two impeachable acts that our Constitution specifically delineates as a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ in Article II, Section 4.”

In attempting to defend President Trump’s actions, certain prominent and well-educated figures, including former Review Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham, have claimed that “attempted bribery” is not an impeachable offense. Katyal’s discussion of bribery illustrates that these claims make no sense. In including bribery, Katyal makes an important point about why a president should never even open himself up the influence of a foreign nation: it illustrates that the President has attempted to sell out the interests of his country for his own interests. From the White House’s released transcript and the whistleblower, there is sufficient evidence to say that President Trump opened his office up to being pressured by the Ukrainian government in the future. It does not matter whether Ukraine took advantage of the President’s phone call or not; it only matters that President Trump would do something that could give Ukraine leverage against his office in the future.

If you are a Trump supporter, this can be a difficult book to read at times. However, I must remind you that—before you are a Trump supporter, before you are a Republican—you are an American. By your own admission, you believe in the Constitution and you believe in the importance of law. I appeal to your sense of integrity and your love of country when I ask you to read this book. Because, as Katyal makes abundantly clear, impeachment is not about which party controls the House or the next election; impeachment is about the need to protect our country from foreign interference.

Some blind supporters of Trump—some populists who, in their heart of hearts, believe that the Constitution can be changed to fit the whims of the modern world—might object to lines in Impeach such as “[T]his much is clear: President Trump believes he’s above the law.” I use the term “blind” here purposely for the following reason. If you half-read Impeach while blasting Fox and Friends and even uncharitably evaluate it, you still cannot find an argument-based reason to disagree with Katyal’s statements regarding the fact that President Trump has acted in ways that illustrate a firm belief that the rules of our legal system do not apply to him and that he has made active efforts to impede investigations into his conduct. If you get through Impeach and believe that President Trump has not violated any presidential rules of conduct and is being unfairly targeted by a witch hunt led by the Democrats, you can no longer say you believe that nobody is above the law. Katyal knows that not all of his readers will agree that President Trump should be found guilty and removed from office. However, he does expect that his readers will gain an understanding of impeachment and critically evaluate the evidence that gets presented at the Senate hearing.

Ultimately, Impeach is the type of book that academics and public intellectuals alike strive to write. It is rare that a book written in a few weeks about a hot-button, divisive issue is so well-researched and unbiased. Impeach fairly presents all sides of an issue integral to the very fabric of our democracy in a way that is simultaneously easily understandable and complex.