By David Gordon, associate editor
The American people probably care more at the moment about whether they are getting what they want from the political system than they do about efforts to impeach President Donald Trump, according to UW-Eau Claire Prof. Michael Fine.
He was one of three Political Science faculty members who took part in a panel discussion earlier this week on the complexities of the presidential impeachment process. The program, on the UW-EC campus, drew an audience of some 65 people, almost all of them students.
Prof. Geoff Peterson, who chairs the department, said a key aspect of the situation is the impact the impeachment process has on public opinion. If the public doesn’t care, Trump won’t be removed by the Senate and perhaps won’t be impeached by the House, he said.
Fine said that “it’s not about whether President Trump committed an impeachable offense.” Rather, he added, “it’s more a matter of President Trump’s constant retort – ‘what’s wrong with that?’” – about actions for which he has come under fire.
That’s a question that Democrats will have to answer to the public’s satisfaction if they hope to muster public support for removing the president from office, as eventually happened in 1974 in regard to President Richard Nixon, Peterson said.
He said that each separate article of impeachment presented to the House for action – apparently two in regard to Trump – is akin to a criminal charge issued by a grand jury. “The Senate is functionally the trial court,” with Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, he added.
While the Senate trial will be public, the senators’ deliberations will be private, he said.
The third panelist, Associate Prof. Eric T. Kasper, spent some time explaining the constitutional provisions that spell out the impeachment process. He said the founding fathers made it a complex procedure precisely because they didn’t want to make it easy to remove a president from office.
Kasper, who is also the director of UW-EC’s Center for Constitutional Studies, noted that if the Senate were to remove Trump from office, that would not bar any future court actions against him.
Fine said that, “unlike a criminal trial, there is no assumption of innocence” in an impeachment proceeding. In the same vein, Peterson said it’s important to remember that an impeachment trial is “not a question of guilt or innocence.”
Rather, he said, it asks “does the charge reach the level where the president should be removed from office?”
In response to a question from the audience, both Kasper and Fine said they expect the Chief Justice to maintain as low a profile as possible while presiding over the Senate trial. Peterson, though, said Roberts could play an enormous role if he chose to, by compelling previously reluctant witnesses such as Sec. of State Mike Pompeo to testify.
Fine, however, noted that Roberts is a political conservative appointed by a Republican president (George W. Bush) and Kasper added his expectation that Roberts “won’t be the center of it.” He said Roberts cares about the entire federal judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, and is unlikely to do anything that could spark attacks on it.
As for the possible impact of impeachment proceedings on the 2020 election, Peterson said that’s very uncertain because there’s no precedent for this in a president’s first term in office.
“What matters, it seems to me, is if the people care,” Fine said.
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