The Hour of The Founders is Here

In the summer of 1973, as the Watergate hearings hit a crescendo and George Beall VIII, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland, whose brother was a Republican senator from Maryland, was investigating the Vice President of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew, for bribery dating back to his days in Baltimore, then-House Majority Leader Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill spoke to his boss, the diminutive Carl Albert of Oklahoma, telling him, “Impeachment is coming, and this House had better be ready.”

Nancy Pelosi, who grew up in Baltimore, probably knows that story and quote. Later today, for just the third time in 232 years since the Constitution was formally adopted, impeachment has come to the 116th Congress. And they are ready.

Donald John Trump, 45th President of the United States, will join Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson as just the third president to be impeached and face removal from office. He is facing two charges. Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress. He will survive due to a puerile and supine Senate, unbending in the fealty to a president who acts more like a mob boss than the ‘leader of the free world.’

In his retrospective on Watergate for American Heritage magazine in 1984, journalist and historian Walter Karp noted “Men of great power do not commit crimes. They procure crimes without having to issue incriminating orders. A word to the servile suffices. Instead of having to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, a President, under that standard, would only have to take care to…