NORTHWESTERN UNIV. LAWPROF STEPHEN PRESSER: McConnell Channels Hamilton to Save the Republic.
The Framers’ greatest fear was that the delicate balance of powers among the three branches would be upset, and that a corrupt faction would come to dominate the government. McConnell made clear his belief this had come to be the Democrats whom he said were “the intemperate or designing majority in the House of Representatives,” that Hamilton “warned might abuse the impeachment power” for partisan gain.
McConnell decried the misguided nature of the Democrats’ hypocritical claim that some Senators, who, like McConnell himself, had clearly indicated their belief in the insubstantial nature of the impeachment charges, could not participate in a fair trial.
McConnell pointed out that Hamilton, in “Federalist 65,” had said that impeachment was not simply a legal proceeding, but was a political one as well, calling for judgements, McConnell said, “about what the common good of our nation requires.”
In a blistering indictment of the Democrats — who certainly did not shed their political partisanship in the trial of President Clinton on impeachment charges 20 years earlier— McConnell declared that senators did not need “condescending lectures on fairness from the House Democrats who just rushed through the most unfair impeachment in modern history . . . or lectures on impartiality from senators who happily pre-judged the case with President Clinton and simply change their standards to suit the political winds.”
Once the United States Senate was regarded as the greatest parliamentary body on the planet, and one could sense an echo of that time, when McConnell trumpeted that “The Framers built the Senate to provide a check against the short-termism, the runaway passions, and the ‘demon of faction’ that Hamilton warned would ‘extend his sceptre’ over the House of Representatives ‘at certain seasons.'”
The Senate exists, explained McConnell, “because the Founders wanted an institution that could stop momentary hysterias and partisan passions from damaging our Republic.”
And we need just that, now.