James Madison’s prescient warning about a president who engineers a scheme of deep-seated and pervasive corruption, grounded in self-dealing to enrich himself and strengthen his ties to law-breaking loyalists through arbitrary acts that violate the Constitution and republican principles, resonates across the nation at this juncture in our history as Americans learn more details about President Donald Trump’s underhanded operations.
President Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which has been withdrawn by the administration, at least for now, coupled with his self-declared immunity — “forever” — from any IRS audits of his tax filings, and those of family members and businesses, a brazen effort to grant himself a self-pardon from such civil inquiries, brings his corruption to a new pitch.
Madison’s declaration at the Constitutional Convention that the president might “pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation and oppression,” anticipated the depths of Trump’s predatory attacks on our system, demonstrated again and again as he exploits the power of the presidency to convert public assets into private wealth. Trump’s activities as a “Day Trader,” which the Associated Press has reported is measured by “more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” in the first quarter of this year, in companies whose stock value he can easily manipulate by his words, tweets and official acts, is illustrative. Trump’s acts of perfidy, his betrayal of the public trust, soar beyond his contemptible stock market forays, which his predecessors in the Oval Office eschewed because of their flagrantly unethical nature. There is the personal financial windfall that he reaped from his shakedown of foreign businessmen and heads of state, who were “encouraged” to stay at his hotel in Washington D.C., in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Not to be overlooked are his importunings to the leaders of Saudia Arabia to invest in businesses in which he has a self-interest, and in the business ventures of his children and son-in-law. Such acts are the price of doing business with President Trump.
Madison’s warning about the predatory potential of a future president did not require on his part much imagination, but rather the utilization of the knowledge he gleaned from his keen study of history which, in the case of England, provided numerous examples of corrupt ministers who had engaged in self-dealing to enrich themselves and their allies, for which, they were impeached. The English history of impeachment, constantly before the eyes of the founders and thus influential in the shaping of the Constitution’s Impeachment Clause, was punctuated with cases that absorbed the interest of delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
The first exercise of the impeachment power in English history — the Earl of Suffolk (1386) – revealed in subsequent years a predictable pattern of the abuse of power in self-serving ways that incurred the wrath of the House of Commons for the next three centuries. Suffolk was impeached for applying appropriated funds to purposes other than those specified by Parliament, which fell into the newly minted category of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The celebrated impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham (1626) reflected self-dealing. Buckingham procured offices for himself, which thus deprived deserving men of the opportunity to hold office, a misdemeanor exacerbated by his procurement of titles of honor for his mother, brothers and other relatives. In 1695, the Duke of Leeds was impeached for accepting money from a company with which he was doing business. This impeachment directly influenced the construction of the Emoluments Clause which, among other things, prevents the president from accepting funds beyond the salary of the executive, as determined by Congress.
These illustrative episodes in the instructive history of impeachment in England, along with others grounded on charges of attempting to subvert the fundamental laws, efforts to introduce arbitrary power, and the betrayal of public trust, promotion of dishonorable measures and causes, and schemes to obtain exorbitant grants and funds incompatible with the duties of one’s office — all offenses committed by Donald Trump — were deemed, by Justice Joseph Story, to be impeachable offenses.
In the Constitutional Convention, Madison and other delegates emphasized, repeatedly, that the congressional power of impeachment represented the most effective deterrent to presidential acts that might inflict injury on the nation. Several of President Trump’s acts would warrant impeachment within the context of the framers’ principles and definitions. Whether Congress lives up to the framers’ standards is another matter.
David Adler is president of The Alturas Institute, a non-profit organization created to promote the Constitution, gender equality and civic education. This column is made possible with the support of the South Dakota Humanities Council, South Dakota NewsMedia Association and this newspaper.
Leave a Reply