Monday, September 9, 2019
Impeachment and Corruption
The other day Mr. Stewart brought up an interesting point that I have never thought about before, the fact that other government officials that are not the president can be impeached by the senate through a two thirds vote. There have been 19 total politicians that were put on trial for impeachment. Out of those 19 that were on trial, 12 were either found guilty and removed, or resigned before the start of the trial. Perhaps the most notable of those 19 being Richard Nixon, the infamous president of the United States who resigned after the Watergate scandal. There are hundreds of examples of government officials being caught in shady activity and while most of them are held responsible, this is still a large issue that no one is talking about. If you to the Wikipedia page titled "List of Federal Political Scandals in the United States" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scandals_in_the_United_States#Barack_Obama_administration_(2009%E2%80%932017) you will find an alarmingly long list of politicians that were caught doing various illegal activities, and this is just all the ones that got caught. There have to be many more that got away with their shady activity. So this begs the question, how do we get rid of all this illicit activity in our government? Well there is no clear cut answer, I think we should first consider putting better more qualified people into these positions of extreme power. Increased background checks or psychological evaluations could also help, but ultimately I think government officials need to realize that they are representing the United States as a whole with every single action they take and should deeply think over everything they do. This problem will likely continue deep into the future unless something is done about it.
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I agree with your point that something needs to change as a result of all these scandals. I think that one thing that would help was more media attention for these scandals, as after some of the biggest scandals public opinion has changed, which will eventually lead to pressure on government officials to be better than there predecessors. Also, one thing that happened during the Watergate scandal in particular was the Supreme Court decision (https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-legacy-of-watergate-five-important-changes-after-the-scandal/). It ruled that the president did not have executive privilege and was not above the law. While this was in relation to needing to hand over the tape for trial, this decision went far beyond that. Hopefully, in the future, presidents will not try to act above the law, but I do agree with your points that there needs to be more done to stop these scandals in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI also was not aware that impeachment applied to people other than the president. However, I'm not sure if the background checks will work (I also don't have a better idea though). The idea of background checking is similar to the power of oversight in the congress (at least in theory). This means that this power can theoretically be abused and used by enemies of someone elected in the government to try and take them out. I predict that it could devolve into a constant "war" of investigations and background checks. Plus, if people are corrupt enough to not really get in trouble and do these kinds of things in government for their own benefit, who's to say that they might fabricate information against whomever they are "checking"? Honestly, like you said, there really is no clear cut answer or solution to this problem, but the first step certainly is recognizing that there is a problem.
ReplyDeleteYes I agree with Annabel. I feel like there is a high chance that politicians will dramatize things their oppositions have done or plainly make up some things. While we do need to be sure we are checking who we are electing as our government leaders, it should not be a battle between who can manipulate the people the best. I feel like this could lead to what Mr. Stewart was talking about a little while ago where it is just a war between politicians and this causes nothing to happen. This is similar to the video we were watching about the lack of action coming from the government (mostly about infrastructure). Mr. Stewart made the point that if one side is constantly demonizing another group, it would be very hard to work with them in the future. Not only would the people not want to work with someone who demonized them, but the supporters of both groups wouldn't want them to work together either. This is a huge problem with the Democrats and the Republicans, one example is with finances over the wall which caused the entire government to shut down. I'm not sure what we could do to fix this because while depolarization of the parties might aid this, past politicians like Madison have argued that this polarization would help control tyranny because "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" (Federalist 51). So what is a good balance between the two? Do we have too strong of polarization? What could be done to counteract this?
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