ARGUMENT: Impeachment & mad kingsNecessary and Insufficient: The Problems Impeachment Does Not Solve

Benjamin Wittes writes in Lawfare that Congress could not ignore President Donald Trump’s behavior over the months since his election defeat—the pattern of behavior that culminated in the president’s move last week to assemble a mob in Washington and loose it on the Capitol.

“If ever a sequence of presidential actions positively required congressional response, a failure of which would render laughable the whole notion of an executive branch bound by any degree of legislative constraint, the president’s launching of a literal assault on the legislative branch while it was counting the electoral votes that would unseat him surely tops the list.” Wittes writes.

Impeachment is a good way for the House of Representatives as an institution to draw a bright, flashing moral and legal line around what the president has done and insist that some behavior is unacceptable and will trigger Congress’s wrath—even if the president is walking out the door and even if the removal power is therefore a redundancy, Wittes writes, but

Impeachment is an awkward remedy in a more practical sense too: It does nothing to disable Trump in the last seven days of his presidency. This is admittedly a short-term problem, one on which the clock is ticking and which every minute of non-disaster ameliorates a little bit. It’s a problem that might take care of itself with time—if we’re lucky.

…

The truth is that Congress acting alone has no good remedy for the short-term problem of a rampaging president when the vice president is too meek to assert himself. So impeachment can send a message that, depending on the Senate’s handling of the trial, may or may not resound through the generations. And impeachment can serve to disqualify Trump from office—or, as John Mulaney might put it, to keep the horse out of the hospitalin the future.

But to the extent the horse is bent on destroying the hospital in his remaining few days inside it, impeachment will not prevent that. It will, at most, act as a modest deterrent—if the horse is capable of being deterred at all

Wittes concludes that

in the longer term, there’s the question of reform. Does the country want to leave in place this strange lacuna in the law of presidential disability and removal? The lacuna arises because Congress can remove a president using impeachment but, in the meantime, has to leave the mad king in possession of all of his powers; and Congress can sustain an internal uprising of the mad king’s Cabinet if he is disabled and temporarily replace him, but it cannot act by itself quickly just because he is—as the speaker of the House called Trump—“a deranged, unhinged, dangerous president.”

Should there be some mechanism for the emergency setting in which the vice president will not step up and lead and the president is mad but not disabled? Should there be some mechanism in which Congress has some remedy for the rampaging horse in the hospital that doesn’t depend on the horse’s having committed a high crime or suffered from some disability but flows from the nature of his being a horse in a location so very different from a stable or a pasture?

These are the questions impeachment cannot answer, the problems it cannot solve. Once the immediate crisis is passed, they are questions Americans should not forget.