It is not too early for the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. He has in his one month of office violated a number of significant laws that injure the Constitution and seriously endanger the fabric of the American order and there is no need to wait until the government is destroyed before it can be remedied. The impeachment power is very broad and inherently political, the Constitution saying “high crimes and misdemeanors” which means anything weighty enough to get Congress to act, as Hillary Clinton said when she was a staffer on the Watergate Committee. Andrew Johnson was in danger of taking over the War Department when it was still a question whether the South would restart the Civil War and so, in my opinion, should have been convicted. The near impeachment of Richard Nixon was also serious because there was a plan and action towards undermining the electoral system. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was frivolous, just a private matter just to get payback over the Nixon resignation, and the two impeachments of Donald Trump were for serious matters: first to use foreign policy for personal political advantage and, second, to overthrow the government.
Here are some of the charges against him. Trump, first off, fired the inspector generals who are career servants who manage abuse in their agencies and so belies his attempt to get rid of fraud and abuse. He did so by failing to provide the thirty day notice required by law, which Senator Lindsey Graham regarded as a technicality b ut is at the heart of the matter, which is an executive branch independent of the chief executive, reliant on law rather than as Trump says, as a king. Trump all but abolished the USAID, which had been established by Congress, and so while there is a degree of flexibility whereby it can be reorganized by the chief executive, it is illegal to abolish the overwhelming part of it because that would be the equivalent of a line item veto and no such act has been passed by Congress and might not pass muster as a constitutional law, at least under most supreme courts, because it unbalanced the arrangements established in the Constitution for the balance between the legislative and the executive branches. Aside from being unconstitutional, dumping the USAID is unwise because the agency gains friends overseas and is an adjunct to the State Department and the Defense Department. Piling up chaotic firings is also open to impeachment because dismembering the executive is so great an affront that itg ios in itself a ground for impeachment in that the President’s job is to faithfully steward the government. That also applies to the wholesale firing of people in the Department of Justice, quite aside from that particular set of firings undermines the independence of justice, another impeachable offense by politicizing the judicial process, as became clear in the Eric Adams case where there was a policy consideration traded for dismissing the Justice Departm ent’s charges against him.
Most egregious of all is Trump allowing Elon Musk to wander around into the most sensitive issues in the Treasury and Defense Departments. Musk has access to the Social Security payment system and has not said what he wants to do with that information. Will he reduce a percent or the whole of Social Security checks that have been sent unfailingly and effectively and efficiently since the first checks were issued in 1940? That would not only be illegal. It would violate what is sensed as a claim on the full faith and credit of the United States, just like the dollar, and so also an impeachable offense. That remedy should be quickly applied so that it is not destroyed before it is remedied. At the least, Congress can demand Musk appear before congress to explain what he is doing, the claim that he is just a technical advisor to the White House clearly a subterfuge in that up to a week ago he claimed to be running DOGE.
The impeachment is our final legal recourse for unseating a President. We have learned that the judicial system is too clumsy and burdensome a method in that it was not able to get to trial either the insurrection case, the stolen documents case and the Georgia case to interfere with the 2020 vote, all of them in the four years since the events happened. The Supreme Court can not be expected to uphol;d constitutional law because the majority, all men, are tainted by corruption, covering up corruption, or having lied during their confirmation hearings that Roe v Wade was settled law without adding that they would overthrow it anyway. The Congress is the final bulwark of the Constitution and even its Conservative members are likely to endorse an impeachment when, finally, public opinion shifts against Trump because of any attempt to reduce or alter Social Security payments without Congressional authorization. Some Senators are chafing at Trump preferring Putin to Zelenskyy and a legitimate impeachment offense is to change basic and long timer foreign policies, such as claiming Canada as a state or arbitrarily taking the Panama Canal. Policy matters, such as dismantling NATO, are also impeachable issues.They are being done without legislative consultation and so interferes with the ability of only the Congress to declare war.
Act in haste rather than try to rebuild the American constitutional structure should you be able to when Trump leaves the scene.