Millennials should reject the very notion of a partisan impeachment as this generation of Democrats on Capitol Hill attempts to shred our Constitution.
This week, House Democrats finally submitted articles of impeachment against our President without any evidence of a “high crime or misdemeanor” — and without the bipartisan support that Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised would be a prerequisite for impeachment. It’s a disgrace.
As acquittal in the Senate nears, millennials should be warned that such behavior cannot become normalized in our Democracy. We must think of the long-term implications of partisan impeachments.
A partisan impeachment is inherently undemocratic. But many Democrats have compounded the problem by neglecting to teach millennials the fundamental civics of this country. A study released in 2016, for example, found that only about 30 percent of American millennials think it is “essential” to live in a Democracy.
This is all a terrible shame for millennials, because we will have to live with a mess that current congressional Democrats created.
For the most part, millennials are not the ones putting our institutions at risk. Millennials aren’t trying to make a mockery of the checks and balances our founding fathers put in place. Millennials haven’t spent the last four months making unfounded, exasperated statements to the press, holding one-sided hearings to give disgruntled civil servants a platform to vent their frustrations at America’s elected president, all in an effort to impeach that leader and cast a pall of uncertainty over our democratic process.
It’s time for millennials to wake up to what the Democrats are trying to do to our Republic. And have the courage to categorically reject a partisan impeachment.
As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in his new book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It, “The rule of law” means “a government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand –– rules based in foreseeable fairness that make it possible for us to foresee with fair certainty how the authority (i.e., the government) will use its coercive powers in given circumstances.”
Even a rudimentary grasp of basic civics makes it obvious that the Democrats have treated our President arbitrarily and unfairly throughout this process.
If a president can be impeached on such thin evidence for nebulous and ill-defined infractions just because a slim majority of the House of Representatives considers it politically expedient to do so, then the Constitution will have been turned into a tool to undermine the very rule of law it was instituted to uphold. It would be the “tyranny of the majority” that the founders feared.
That would leave millennials a country far less stable, far less confident in its democratic institutions, and far more open to further abuses by a slim majority whenever such abuses are deemed politically expedient. That’s undemocratic and wrong — and millennials should reject the very notion of a partisan impeachment, for the sake of our Republic.
John Pence (@JePence) is a Senior Adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign. He is an alumnus of The College of William & Mary and holds a law degree from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a business degree from New York University.
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