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| "The impeachment of Andrew Johnson" Theodore R. Davis, Harper's Weekly, April 11, 1868. |
How do you get rid of an odious, deleterious, maleficent, malodorous prez or prime minister who needs of rid to be gotten afore the a-fixed term is
up? Herein I shall present the alternative methods of three political systems
and tell you which one is the best.
Amid the news of the the FBI's investigation of President Trump
for obstruction of justice, many of us are thinking about impeachment, with
practically everybody on the left already having mentally convicted him of
treason long ago. It is, in my opinion, entirely reasonable that people should
want him out of office, because he doing severe damage to America, though there
are two caveats: many people felt exactly the same way about Obama, and Trump
has as yet done very little damage to America in terms of domestic policy. Far
more dangerous is the way he is reshaping norms (not the least of common decency) and fanning
the flames of global anti-Americanism.
We should keep in mind that the way we are supposed to
remove presidents from office is by voting for their opponents. But sure, you
don’t want to wait four years. Well then, you had damn well better vote for
Democratic representatives in 2018, because Republicans aren’t going to impeach
him.
On the other side of the pond, meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa
May’s snap election has resulted in a hung parliament (translation: her party
won’t be able to get stuff done). Americans, consider, if you please: if Labor
had gotten another couple dozen seats, she would be out of office. Yes, that’s right, in parliamentary democracies, all you
have to do to remove your crazy national executive is vote the opposition party
into a parliamentary majority. Then their party leader becomes prime minister.
Boom—country saved! What’s more, a parliamentary election could happen
basically any time at all, should the parliament vote to hold it. All of this could happen in a couple months! Alternatively, the
governing party could hold a vote of no confidence in the prime minister and
then select a new one. Wham—country saved! That’s democracy, folks.
On the other hand, the Queen could dissolve the parliaments
of Canada and Australia, which is a threat to democracy in theory, but European
royalty in this century are leery of taking such actions for the good and
obvious reason that people wouldn’t stand for it unless the monarch, in so
doing, were obeying the will of the people.
In other words, parliamentary democracies are flexible and
responsive to the needs of their constituents. In other words, they have more
democratic legitimacy than the American system, even when they are
constitutional monarchies. Words are unstable. Their connotations shift until
their denotations have shifted, too. Political words are particularly shifty
little buggers. If a president, a hundred years ago, had acted in excess of the
authority constitutionally granted to him, people might have said that he was “acting
like a king.” But nowadays, it would be far more accurate to say of a monarch
flouting the will of the people that “her majesty is acting like a president.”
America is anomalous in being a
stable presidential democracy. In some sense too stable. Granted, the
constitution did not set up a system stable enough to avert civil war, but
consider that we have not had a real constitutional crisis, large scale
political violence, or a change in our system of government since 1865. Few
countries can make a similar claim. Take a look at other presidential
democracies in the Americas. The problem with presidential democracies is that
removing the president is hard, and when people try, the president usually
becomes a dictator and jails/kills them.
But thank your ever-lucky stars that you don’t live in a “real
democracy.” Let us ponder, for a moment, what would be necessary to
remove from office the president of a Communist country. We might, for example,
consider a hypothetical East Asian unitary one-party state governed by the eternal
wisdom of the heroic vanguard of the people. Ooo, but which one? Hint: it
rhymes with finer. Not that I am suggesting that anyone actually would be so
ungrateful as to want to have a say in selecting the head of Party-state,
especially when one considers the obvious wisdom of a Party which has “lifted
hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.” But, you know. Just a stray
thought. Let’s say I’m “letting a flower bloom.”
The presidency, in this perhaps mythical country, is a composite
office. There is a position of head of state which is translated into English
as president. Typically, the holder of that office is also the General
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Also, this selfsame
person is usually the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. So that makes him head of state (mostly ceremonial), head of Party (most
important), and head of military (important). With me so far?
Now the thing you must understand is that without the Party,
there is no state. For every government office, there is a Party office shadowing
it. The Party decides; the government implements (that’s also true in America,
by the way, though our government officials tend to exercise
their decision-making faculties more autonomously. The other key difference, of
course, is that we have two parties, who switch places once in a while
more-or-less in accordance with the will of the people [not that I’m implying
that “the Party” does not govern in accordance with the will of the people. I
would never say that]).
As General Secretary of the Central Committee is the most
important office, let’s look at how a person gets in there. The first thing you’ll
want to do is be a member of the Party. The second thing is to get elected to
higher and higher levels of the Party’s organization (whose precise details I
shall omit here) over the course of many years of meritorious service. The
third thing is to get elected to the Central Committee (of the Party). The
fourth thing is to get elected to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee
(the Politburo). The fifth thing is to get elected to the Standing Committee of
the Politburo. Finally, they can make you General Secretary.
Note that these elections tend to be pretty harmonious (that
is to say, not especially competitive). If there were, say, 206 seats up
for grabs in the Central Committee, you might have something like 227
candidates (I have definitely maintained plausible deniability. Those numbers
could refer to approximations of the actual numbers in either of two or three real states, or maybe
a fictional one!).
Review:
Party
V
Various levels
V
Central Committee
V
Politburo
V
Politburo Standing
Committee
V
General Secretary of
the Central Committee (of the Communist Party; also president; also Chairman of the Central Military
Commission; known in English simply as “president”)
So what if you’re not a member of the Party? Can you vote
for somebody for one of these offices? Actually, yes. Depending on how well
this has been implemented thus far where you happen to live, there is the
possibility that you may vote for your local Party representative, who will go
on to vote for all of the above. This is to say that this particular mythical
state which I am describing does have a certain degree of democratic
legitimacy. Though the elections may or may not be competitive, they have
become more so in recent years. Needless to say, you need to be a Party member
to run.
So what if—Marx forbid!—you were crazy enough to think
that in some tenuously plausible alternative reality you might just go so far
as to perhaps begin to contemplate the possibility of maybe kind of considering
ejecting the president from office before he has duly completed the
constitutionally mandated term of said office (five years, two terms) in
accordance with the will of the people? Well, you might begin by joining the
Party. You would also definitely be a whiny little ingrate who has no
patriotism and no shame!
But hey, American reader—who says you can do anything
about Trump? Huh, smart guy? Well, you could elect a Democratic representative
to the House, and they might or might not move to begin impeachment proceedings,
should the special prosecutor find that the President is
probably guilty of a crime. Actually, impeachment is a strange process: it’s kind of an alternate version of a criminal trial, except the House is the
prosecutor and the Senate is the jury. The House votes to impeach, then the
Senate has to vote to convict. Then what? Who knows? Probably a coup or
something. It’s never happened!
