FYI. Impeachment is NOT removal from office. Instead, it is a form of indictment and it means that the impeached person must stand trial (that might or might not result is his or her removal from office).
The other day, I heard someone on RF criticize the current impeachment process as "political".
I did not have the leisure to respond to them at the time I came across their comment and I have by now forgotten who they were, but I have not forgotten that they appeared to believe impeachment should be totally free of politics. That is, a non-political process.
My question is, do they -- or does anyone --
really think the American Founders thought it would be best if impeachment was free of politics?
But hey, I'll play along....
So OK, you good folks who think impeachment should be a wholly non-political process, first please explain to me just why you think it should be?
Next my friends, please explain to me why -- if the Founders wanted impeachment to be as non-political as possible, they failed to assign the duty to the Supreme Court -- rather than to Congress? Were they such idiots that they could not fathom the Court might be at least a little less political than the part of government they intended to be the MOST political of all (i.e. the House)?
Third, good ladies and gentlemen, please kindly tell me how it is that impeaching an elected president is best done by non-elected persons on the Supreme Court who have been purposely isolated as much as possible from the will of the people*, and cannot claim to represent it? Would the Founders not actually want the people's will to be altered (if it must be altered) by those very people (i.e. Congress) who can at least claim to collectively represent the people's will? Does it honestly make sense that the Founders would want the will of the people to be altered (if it must be altered) by people (i.e. the Supreme Court) who are as immune to the people's will as the Founders could make them?
Those questions will do for now, even though -- in my opinion -- I haven't even touched here on the most likely reason the Founders made impeachment just as political as they could make it. Doing so, however, would require a much longer OP.
......
* The phrase "the will of the people" is here used in the traditional sense of "the will of the people as expressed through who they voted into office". That is, the Constitution set things up so that the will of the people was originally most directly expressed by the House of Representatives, but also to a lesser extent by the President and the Senate. However, the Supreme Court was arguably the least representative of the people's will of all the branches.
