This is Democracy – Episode 76: Impeachment

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Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today’s topic is a topic that has dominated the news for a number of weeks. It’s the topic of impeachment. We’re looking in particular at the historical development of impeachment as a part of our governing system, especially in the last few decades, going back earlier, but particularly from the Clinton years to the present. We have with us my colleague and friend and someone who has bean doing some of the most important writing and speaking on the subject in the entire country, Professor Jeff Tulis. He’s a professor in the Government Department here at the University of Texas, and he’s a leading scholar of American politics and the presidency in particular. He’s the author of a number of important books, a book that had a deep influence on me and many other people in the field, The Rhetorical Presidency. He’s also written on the presidency and the constitutional order. Most recently, really a wonderful co-authored book on The Legacies of Losing in American Politics. A book that really makes the case that the losers often turn out to be the winners in the long run, which can give many of us solace, maybe right now. Jeff, it’s great to have you on.

Jeffrey Tulis: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Before we turn to our discussion with Jeff, we have, of course, our poem for Mr. Zachary Suri. What’s the title of your poem today Zachary?

Zachary Suri: Two Images.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Two Images. Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: There are two images in the mind of the American soul now. As we struggle through viscous nights when the stress of work, iPhone and delayed election results coming through on the television. There are two images in the mind of the American soul now. As we lean on coffee mugs for support on the clogged up roads bumpy with the acne of our adolescent nation. There are two images in the mind of the American soul now. Much like I am left with two images every morning that hang on the wall, stars and stripes, the lone star and the pledge of allegiance, drowned out by the crunchy sound of polynomials. There are two images in the mind of the American soul. One is ripped from the tabloid headlines that crashed a princess into a Paris tunnel wall. The other is blunt whiplash of slamming against truth, but the knowledge deep down that we will all have to feel how far away it is, when our heads slams back against the headrest. I mean, what just happened here? It seemed to come and go. The impeachment of a president, like the January snow. Some of us remember the last time it happened. The same rooms, the same senators, the same lawyers, and one who defended murderers named after fruit juice. The same independent counsel now railing against independent counsels. I am too young now to remember what it was like when the president’s sexual affairs were the scandal of the decade. There are two images in the mind of the American soul, the supposed two Americas, but they fight against the same sticky wind and relish in the same smell of drizzle along concrete sidewalks. These are the two images in the mind of the American soul, injustice and injustice. Justified intrusions that languish and partisanship, and unjustified attacks that justifiably died in the mouse traps of democracy.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: There’s a lot in that Zachary. What is your poem about?

Zachary Suri: Well, my poem is really about America’s reckoning with the current impeachment trial, but also with the Clinton impeachment trial in particular. What it’s really about is how this generation of Americans is growing up, seeing more impeachments than all past generations combined had. I think it’s an interesting comment on the state of our politics at the current moment.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s a great place to turn to Jeff, how did we get where we are today? How did we get from Bill Clinton, who comes up prominently in Zachary’s poem, to where we are today with this current impeachment, Jeff?

Jeffrey Tulis: Well, I’m not sure that there’s a direct link between Clinton and this impeachment. But between the time of Clinton and now, we developed something that some people call hyper-partisanship, which is much more problematic than what most people think is the problem, which is often called polarization. We’ve had polarization in American politics throughout our history. Even at the most dire moments, when the compromises themselves were a problem, say the Missouri Compromise, there was a compromise.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Exactly.

Jeffrey Tulis: So polarization is not necessarily a problem. What hyper-partisanship is, is the idea that you stick with your party, even if the opposing party proposes your own policies are policies that you yourself proposed previously. So there’s some political scientists in DC, Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein who’ve written about this and have a lot of vivid examples of Obama coming into office. Not only does McConnell literally pledge that he’s not going to advance anything that Obama proposes, a kind of eerie symmetry between that, by the way, and the fact that he pledges not to adhere to his oath.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: -in the impeachment trial.

Jeffrey Tulis: In the impeachment trial, which is really striking.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: You’ve written a lot about this actually.

Jeffrey Tulis: Well, yeah, and the short point on that is we’ve had people throughout American political history that haven’t lived up to their oaths. Just like people get married and end up not being faithful to their marriage vows. But it’s very rare that somebody would actually marry somebody who pledged not to follow their vows the night before they got married. So that’s very unusual. But in any event, hyper-partisanship is a version of that, where in the case of Obama, one of his first pieces of legislation proposed was a bill that McCain, who he had defeated, had failed to pass. So he proposed in a way on his behalf, and McConnell even got McCain to oppose his own bill as part of this binding together of a party understanding itself more as a tribe, than a political party committed to the ideas that brought them to Washington.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Why does that happen? That seemed to be the case with the Clinton impeachment, to connect it back to that, where there seemed to be such a mobilization around Newt Gingrich of his supporters to do anything to go after Bill Clinton, perhaps as much on the other side to do anything to defend Bill Clinton. What brought us to that moment? Because you’re saying that’s not the norm in American history.

Jeffrey Tulis: It’s not, and I think you’re right to point to Clinton. You might, at some further podcasts, want to have our colleague Sean Theriault on here because he’s written about the formative influence that Gingrich had on the Senate, in the way that he in effect, politically educated all these House members who then went on. But what’s interesting there is you get an initial movement on the part of Gingrich, to actually advance a substantive policy agenda, which was then known as the Contract with America, or the Democrats thought of it as the Contract on America. But it was actually a substantive policy agenda, but to do it, Gingrich both got in a position to do it and then tried to advance doing it by smashing some of the traditions and norms of the Senate in order to get the Republican party in a position to be more powerful to advance those ideas. There was still an idea aspect to it. What happens over time is that this smashing of these institutions to obtain power to advance ideas, overruns the notion that you go to politics to advance ideas in the first place.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Now, it’s about winning at all costs?

Jeffrey Tulis: Right.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So many have said, you seen this in the news all the time. It will come up in the last minutes before the Senate votes on Trump’s conviction or non conviction. It’s often said that impeachment is an inherently political process. Obviously that’s the case, but I hear you saying, Jeff, this is a different kind of political process from how impeachment was intended by the framers. Is that fair to say?

Jeffrey Tulis: It is. Well, first of all, it was always intended to be a political process. The point was that there are different kinds of politics. There’s ordinary partisan contestation. Then there might be high politics. What makes it high politics is that it’s a matter of contestable judgment that is not easily reducible to legal formulae, but is not just an ideological or policy difference, but is a judgment about whether somebody, for example, has abused their office, lived up to their duties, fulfilled their responsibilities, or in some way violated the constitution which is not necessarily codified in the criminal code.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: And as the nature of the office of the presidency that you and I both written about has changed of course, the nature of presidential abuse has changed as well.

Jeffrey Tulis: Right. It’s changed, but it’s changed in a direction that was anticipated. There are a lot of people in the legal world now and academic world who are known for the so-called unitary theory of executive power. They may be have gone too far in suggesting that the ambit and scope of presidential power and denying any other competing powers. They may have gone much too far in the articulation of this.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think they definitely have gone to far from my point of view.

Jeffrey Tulis: Mine too. But what I want to stress now is it starts with a true point, which is there is this argument for unity and the executive which they take too far, but is in fact designed to make a president a very powerful office that has certain capacities that were lacking under the Articles of Confederation that were needed for a new country. So if you imagine that we didn’t have any presidency at all and just said, what does this country need? Somebody said, we need the capacity to be able to respond to unforeseen contingencies. We need the capacity to respond to attacks quickly. We need the capacity to keep national secrets, all that stuff. Then you build this institution that has those capacities. That institution is going to have an enormous amount of power, especially at the beginning of either a policy cycle or war, even the possibility of starting war. The notion that the three branches are coordinate and coequal under the Constitution, which they are, means that they all derive their authority from the Constitution, not from each other. But it can’t mean that they have the same amount of power at any given moment.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Jeffrey Tulis: Which is often the image in textbooks on American politics that’s always made in gridlock, when in fact it’s quite dynamic. So that the presidency has more power at certain moments. But that only makes sense in a republic if the congress has more power at other moments. In general, the way that should be conceptualized is prospectively looking forward, the presidency has more power. Retrospectively judging what the president has done, the congress should have more power. That structural idea is actually the most important feature of the impeachment power and the trial process. It’s actually been lost in the contemporary debate. Keith Whittington who teaches at Princeton, wrote an op-Ed in the New York Times in the midst of this debate that should have gotten even more attention than it did because he pointed out that it’s the second article that’s really important and that really reflects this because the second article is defending the Congress’s prerogatives, its whole panoply of powers against the executive branch. If you don’t uphold those, the Congress has no power and you can’t uphold those if the impeachment power isn’t vital.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: This brings us actually to a question that one of our students has asked. This is Trace Suder who’s a fourth year biology major who asked a question about this very topic. Let’s hear Trace’s question.

Trace: After listening to the articles of impeachment being presented against Donald J.Trump. My question is what defines abuse of power and obstruction of justice? Knowing that there is at least some evidence against him. What more is needed to definitively say he broke these laws?

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Where Trace talks about obstruction of justice here. I think the reference in this case is to obstruction of Congress which is the second article you were just talking about.

Jeffrey Tulis: So it’s useful just to clarify that for everybody. The Mueller report has 10 obstructions of justice and those actually might even be indictable crimes, but for a memo of the Justice Department’s saying that the president can’t be indicted while in office. The Articles of Impeachment are obstructions of Congress and they do reflect as the questioner asked, the abuse of power. One thing that a lot of people don’t notice is that Article 2 which is the article about the presidency which is modeled to some degree on the executive article in the New York State Constitution. It’s clear in the New York Constitution because it’s labeled in a way that it isn’t in the federal constitution. But the structure is similar, in which the president is given both powers and duties. So the duties is the key thing because if you don’t adhere to them, you are in fact abusing your power. Madison was asked about this powers duty relation in both the Federal Convention, the Drafting Convention, and in the Virginia Ratifying Convention. He mentioned, I believe it was in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, that if in fact you had a president who has the quintessential executive power, which is the power to pardon, which we think of as unlimited. That is you can pardon somebody for almost any reason at all. It isn’t actually unlimited because the impeachment is one of the limits. You can’t pardon somebody who’s been impeached, and I would argue by extension, you might not be able to pardon somebody for an act to protect your own impeachment. But that has never been litigated. But it’s mentioned that there’s this restriction. Madison goes further and says, look it might be the case that we want a president to have this massive power, for example, because there might be civil unrest in which pardoning somebody who did something bad might actually be necessary for the domestic tranquility of the country or something like that. But that kind of extraordinary power which we might want somebody to have can obviously be abused. In the Clinton case, for example, he wasn’t impeached for it. But on the day he left office, he pardoned a campaign contributor Marc Rich. There’s some question about the corruption of that act. But Madison’s point was, look, in order for the pardon power to be robust, it obviously has to be broad, and we have to allow most of these pardons to stand, virtually all of them except the impeachment exception. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t hold the president accountable for the way that he used the pardon power and actually said that was an abuse of office. Those six pardons, we’re looking back on it now, and they were totally unjustified. They were done for corrupt purpose whatever and we’re going to impeach you for that. That was one of his examples of what it meant to abuse office.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yeah, right. The obstruction of Congress here, the argument here is that the president has actively prevented Congress from doing exactly what you were saying Congress’s role is retrospective judgment on the actions of the president and the legitimacy and constitutionality of those actions.

Jeffrey Tulis: Yeah, the president announced that they would simply not cooperate with the impeachment investigation. That’s the fundamental claim. That’s why even though they had all these back and forths about subpoenas and so forth, the basis of Schiff’s position was the president had said that no matter what we did, his executive branch was ordered not to cooperate and you can’t obstruct anymore than that.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Which in your explanation runs directly counter to recognizing the role of Congress. It’s delegitimizing Congress’s work to oversee the president.

Jeffrey Tulis: Right, and not just in impeachment. For example, before the impeachment inquiry was official as an impeachment inquiry, subpoenas were issued for various officials to testify and they were contested by the executive branch. Here’s where things have gotten muddy and historically changed over time. In the 19th century, the Congress always enforced those subpoenas with their own powers and methods, including having the sergeant-at-arms, including holding people who refused to attend Congress summoned by a subpoena, they would hold them in contempt of Congress.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Put in jail in Congress or in the DC prisons.

Jeffrey Tulis: Right, and they have the sergeant-at-arms. Now, they didn’t end up having to actually do it with actual executive branch officials because they did it enough with private citizens connected to those officials that the officials believed that they would be arrested. So they came and testified. We’re talking about people like Daniel Webster, who had been former Secretary of State and brought in to testify about State Department business, and all sorts of other people in the 19th century were actually compelled to cooperate with Congress by Congress using its own powers and authorities vigorously. Then in the 20th century, they thought it might be more efficient to use the Justice Department to enforce some of these rather than doing it themselves. That began a slide into abdication of their own power by actually delegating it. Not just this, but so many things to the executive that they lost both the memory, the experience, and the practice of institutional self-defense.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Impeachment is part of that story. Because Clinton did cooperate, but he also negotiated. Congress did not simply call the people it wanted to call. There was an actual negotiation between Clinton which you could see is a step to where we are.

Jeffrey Tulis: Well, it’s actually supposed to be that. To some degree that’s okay. In this impeachment debate, the lawyer for the president said there’s supposed to be an accommodation process. Well, it’s not a legal norm. It’s a separation of powers practice that makes a certain sense, which is that the president, out of some self-interested motive, no doubt, just as some of the congressmen might be acting out of a partisan motive, finds a constitutional argument that has merit on its own. I’ll give you one because I can only find one from the president’s side in the current impeachment. Early on in the impeachment process, when they decided to shift and to try to make it less contestable that you could actually avoid the subpoenas, Speaker Pelosi announced that they were transitioning to an impeachment inquiry, and these were the committees that were going to conduct that inquiry. That ramped up the significance of the claims made on the president. The initial response by the president’s lawyers was very smart. Let me just back up a little bit. In the Clinton impeachment, to do the same thing, they passed a series of resolutions that specified how these committees were going to work, how the president’s people could or could not participate in all that stuff. In the initial moment of the current impeachment inquiry, Nancy Pelosi just set it up herself. She set it up herself because between the time of Clinton and now, the house rules had changed so that previously, all subpoenas had to require resolutions. But now, chairmen of committees were given independent authority to issue subpoenas. So she said, “I’m just telling these committees they can use their independent authority that they have under this new set of rules.” The president’s lawyers smartly responded, “Look, the Constitution gives the sole power of impeachment to the House, not to the Speaker of the House unless, by some formal process, the House has given the Speaker of the House the responsibility to carry out their will.” When they set up these rules for committee chairs, they didn’t set them up for impeachment, they just set them up for normal politics. This is impeachment. You have to have an impeachment vote that either says you, Speaker Pelosi, get to do stuff or we have a resolution like we used to have. She eventually said, “Okay, we’re going to have the resolution like we used to have.” They passed these resolutions and in effect reauthorized these committees. That is actually an example of the old way working and working the way it’s supposed to work. She was forced to say it both not only had public resonance, but there was some merit to that position. She actually stepped up to the plate and said, “Okay, that was an accommodation.”

Dr. Jeremi Suri: There upon the subpoena should have been. [inaudible]

Jeffrey Tulis: They should have been.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, you have a question.

Zachary Suri: I was wondering how perjury and the specific charges against Clinton fit into this narrative of these changing institutions.

Jeffrey Tulis: Now, in the case of Clinton, it illustrates something that sort of true in the generally untrue presentation of Alan Dershowitz. Alan Dershowitz advanced the proposition that you can only be impeached for something that is illegal, criminal violation or a violation of some statute, it can’t be for abuse of office or violation of duty or something like that. Now that’s wrong as a matter of theory. It’s wrong as a matter of any version of originalism, framers originalism, original meaning original, every single one it violates any structural theory and therefore 90 some percent of the law professors in the country who study this sort of thing say it’s just plain wrong. However, there were lawyers sort of like Dershowitz during the Johnson impeachment and they convinced the Senate to not vote on the tenth article for Andrew Johnson which is the one most interesting to me because it was about his rhetoric and it was rhetoric that was abusive and sounded in many ways very similar though not as bad as Trump’s rhetoric and they were persuaded that it didn’t violate any law, even though it was an abuse of office and so this notion got sort of set in motion in the political culture that you should only be impeached for things that violated the law. During the Nixon impeachment it came up again. They had a big fight about that and they decided encase their abuse of power charges in legal language as a kind of concession to this proposition then they get to the Clinton impeachment and instead of charging him with the act of having sex with an intern, an employee of the White House and I would pause here and say, imagine today that the same issue came up after the Me Too movement. One could imagine that he would be impeached and convicted.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Jeffrey Tulis: Because thinking about all the CEOs around the country that are going down every week. But at the time that aspect of it was thought to be, well, it was consensual and what law did he really violate? So he was asked about it under oath and lied about it and then he was charged with perjury. I started to say arguably because while he definitely lied about it, it was only arguable that it was perjury. People that remember this episode will know that he got on TV and answered  one question, it depends what the definition of is is and in another point he argued that if you didn’t have sexual intercourse, you didn’t have sex.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Jeffrey Tulis: There are archaic definitions of sex in which that’s true. In other words that is a definition that has viability historically and so he did that on purpose because he understood that perjury law is very technical and requires all sorts of elements and I think that there is an argument that he didn’t commit perjury even though he unquestionably lied.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: But he was charged with perjury [inaudible].

Jeffrey Tulis: He was charged with perjury because there’s an argument he did commit perjury and it was a law that was a criminal violation.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. So one of the arguments that’s made in the current impeachment trial by Senator Lamar Alexander for example and others, is and I believe Senator Murkowski, Lisa Murkowski also made this argument. Yes, Trump did something inappropriate in his phone call but it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachability, that he shouldn’t be thrown out of office for this. How does that to you compare to the claim that what Clinton did that some make did rise to that level. Many of the people who were voting against removing Trump, voted to remove Clinton. Do either of them in your eyes stand at that level of convicting and removing a president? How should we judge these things?

Jeffrey Tulis: I have absolutely no doubt, one iota, that Trump far exceeds impeachable behavior, and his behavior is much worse than what Clinton did. At the same time I was not averse at the time to the fact that Clinton was impeached and retrospectively and talking to my colleague Sandy Levinson in the law school, who reminded me of the many members of his own administration that he got unawares to them to lie on his behalf, that an argument could be made that he should have been.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Clinton.

Jeffrey Tulis: Clinton should have been impeached or forced to resign or something and I mention all that because I think that the story that is being told in the Senate now and the story that’s been told historically is that the thing that we want to worry about most in American politics is too much impeachment and we’ve never had a successful impeachment. But the worry is that, well, if we impeach this guy, the Republicans are saying, who knows how many impeachments we’re going to have.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: If we convict him we’ve impeached him.

Jeffrey Tulis: I mean if we convicted him, we’re opening the door to partisan impeachment trials of most presidents and my view is that the opposite is the case. That we’ve had too few impeachments, not too many. We’ve never had any and as a result, we’ve sort of disempowered the entire array of congressional tools that would all be robust if the possibility of impeachment was there to enforce them. So that’s one thing that I think in the general popular culture I strongly disagree with the worry that there’s been too much as opposed to the problem that there has been too little.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: One of our undergraduates has asked what we should do about that. This is Julia Cuddy, who’s a first year student to sociology and journalism major.

Julia: Hi, my name is Julia Cuddy and I’m a first year sociology major. My question is, do you think that despite the numerous impeachment investigations put into place over the course of history the fact that only three Presidents in the US have been impeached yet never removed from office, has resulted in a weaker government less likely to productively fix a corrupt system? In other words, has the lack of enforcement when it comes to impeachment enabled presidents to act as if they’re indestructible?

Jeffrey Tulis: Good question.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Is that a good question?

Jeffrey Tulis: Excellent question and the answer is yes, you’re right on target. It’s absolutely the case and here’s the interesting irony in it. The assumption is that if you have a successful conviction, you’re going to open the door to too many impeachments and I think it’s just the opposite, that if you have a successful conviction, you’re going to have more presidents as you suggested in your question, worried about how they behave in office so that they don’t get impeached because it’s a real possibility that they could. So I’m not saying that if you open the door to impeachment of one President, you might not in the future have yet another one, of course you might. But what would be wrong with that? Another way to put the point to the Republicans today is, well, if another president, Democrat or Republican, acts the way that Donald Trump does, yes, we want to impeach them too and Adam Schiff in his closing speech said the same thing. He said I hope we don’t have a Democrat like that and he was even honest in saying I’m not in your position, so I can’t say definitively how I would feel and how you feel but I hope that you feel the way I wish I would feel which is that we can’t put up with this kind of thing.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. The way to actually change behavior is to follow through on the conviction for someone’s misbehavior.

Jeffrey Tulis: Right.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So what should we do, Jeff? I mean, we have to go forward now and we hope we’ll get through this mess somehow. As a scholar of the constitution and the Presidency in American politics, how should we go forward in future years if we have a chance to change this process?

Jeffrey Tulis: Well, the first thing is that there was a big debate about whether to do this impeachment in the first place knowing as the Democrats did, that conviction was virtually nullity, virtually impossible. Yet they went forward anyway and Nancy Pelosi delayed for a long time because she knew there’s some cost to doing that and she decided that the benefits outweighed the costs and I think the first step in the answer to your question is, having gone through this process, even though a loss is the first step that you’re asking for and this alludes to the book that you.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Jeffrey Tulis: Mentioned that I wrote, The Legacies of Losing. Sometimes losing is in fact the resources and instruments for later victories. Sometimes the dissenting opinions in Supreme Court cases that go down on that side end up being much more vital, much more informative and much more influential years later than the victorious opinion or the majority opinion of the court. If we think of the loss in the Trump case as the dissenting opinion, it’s unquestionably clear that the rhetoric of the dissenters in the case of the dissenters is far more powerful than the case of the winners and this is going to live on. The first way it lives on and we don’t know how it’s in the short-term is, it has the potential to improve the chances of the Democratic party across the board in the next election. Potential does not mean for sure, but the resources are there if skillfully used to make corruption a central theme of this campaign.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Jeffrey Tulis: In making that case, one can revisit and also elaborate the impeachment issue, especially the effort to shut it down at the end. One of the most interesting things is a man like Lamar Alexander says that he thinks this is highly inappropriate conduct. That he thinks should be decided however in an election rather than throwing a president out. Now, that argument I don’t think is defensible but it’s plausible. It’s a plausible argument. But if it is a plausible argument, it also implies that he had no good reason not to give the American people evidence and testimony under oath about the issue he thought was so inappropriate.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right, I agree.

Jeffrey Tulis: Rather than propaganda in a campaign.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Jeffrey Tulis: For the campaign. From his own perspective, we should’ve had witnesses and documents. So that will be an issue, the reason why we didn’t have will be an issue, I’m not a predictor, I’m just suggesting that these are resources that if used skillfully could be helpful in the short term to actually deal with corruption. Republics go down by corruption historically, that’s where we are now.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. What about the process of impeachment? At the core of Julia’s question is that perhaps the founders didn’t anticipate the ways in which the growth of the presidency would undermine the safe guards or guardrails that they put in place. What should Congress do? What would you advise the next if there’s a Senate majority leader as well as a House Speaker who really want to improve the process and improve Congressional oversight, what would you suggest to them?

Jeffrey Tulis: My story is that notwithstanding Trump and Trumpism, that the long-term problem in the 20th century for American governance has been Congress, not the presidency. That if you just take Trump for a moment out of the equation, because really a lot of it has to do with his personality exploiting the office. If you take him out of the equation, what you see is an increasingly, to many people’s minds, imperial presidency but not because of an imperial character of the office holder, but because of the abdication and deference of the Congress to the president, delegating away their own powers over budget making in war and not standing up to vote on the tough issues and leaving it to the president to decide, not exercising their powers aggressively, transferring power so as to avoid blame for tough decisions, all that sort of stuff. The answer is that it’s the Congress that needs to be fixed. Do I know how to do that? Not in a shorthand. But I actually think that the Congress being fixed is the fix to the problem of presidential power.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That makes a lot of sense. Zachary, for you and your friends who care a lot about politics. You’re wearing a political T-shirt now, you’re following the presidential race, is this something that could motivate you to actually elect a Congress that would actually step in? Because that seems to be where Jeff’s advice takes us. That Congress actually needs to stand up to presidents on both sides of the aisle who have been doing more things that approach abuse and defy Congress. Do you do find that a motivating factor?

Zachary Suri: I think that that’s one of the benefits of going through these processes is that a lot of us, particularly young people think of the presidency as the figurehead of American politics, as the only office that matters. I think that these processes remind us that we have three equal branches and that American democracy is complicated. It’s not as simple as one person.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. It does seem Jeff we’ve in the last few years emphasized the presidency in the courts and forgotten the Congress.

Jeffrey Tulis: Zachary’s remark just made me think that the potential here is really greater than I just imagined till you started talking. Because an ordinary person, an ordinary citizen doesn’t really get to know their president personally speaking. But you can get to know your Congress person.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Absolutely.

Jeffrey Tulis: You can have real conversations with them. You can say, ”I’m interested in all the policy issues you’re talking about but I’m also interested in this idea of a Congressman or woman who stands up for the institution, who does the right thing and ask,’ ‘What would you do in these circumstances? Would you stand up to a President from your own party who did the stuff that Trump did?” A lot of these people are going to say, ”Yes, I would. Yes, I will.” If they promised their constituents that, they’re going to do it.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right. I think that’s a great point and a great place to close. Part of what we’ve seen I think in this impeachment as we did in Bill Clinton’s and in the others before, but particularly in these last two is the vital role that Congress plays. If Congress doesn’t stand up to presidential abuses of power, those abuses will continue. It’s not simply about Donald Trump in this case.

Jeffrey Tulis: Right.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: I think all of us as citizens recognizing that there’s a historical imperative to pay attention to Congress and to demand that Congress stand up for its oversight responsibilities I think is a really important takeaway. Jeff, thank you for your insights, all the work you’ve done around these issues.

Jeffrey Tulis: Thanks a lot.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, thank you as always for your wonderful poem and your insights as well. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

MALE 2: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

MALE 3: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at Harrisonlemke.com.

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