Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have an amazing show for you today. Volts David Roberts joins us to talk the latest in climate change. It's changing. But first we have the author of the Law of Presidential Impeachment, A Guide for the Engaged Citizen, Michael Geherhardt. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Michael, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Let's talk about the Law of Presidential Impeachment, The Guide for the Engaged Citizen. Explain to us what this book is about.
Well, my hope is that the book will clarify and educate folks about what the law of presidential impeachment is. That means sort of explaining the con social process for impeachment and clarifying any sort of misconceptions and hopefully making it somewhat easier for the public to follow and if they wish to engage in the process to do so. And I go through several of the presidential impeachments in our history to try to explain what happened and their impact on the law.
That's really interesting. Give me the presidential impeachment shorthand here are like, give me the earliest one. In some background on that.
I think the basic law of presidential impeachment is that presidents are subject to impeachment for and conviction for treason, bribery, and other serious abuses of power.
Period.
That's the basic thrust of the law of presidential impeachment. In many respects, it's not that complicated, but as I try to explain the book, there is an incentive for the people who are subjected to impeachment, such as presidents, to try and confuse or create some uncertainty over that basic law. I just can you say a little more sure.
What impeachment was designed to do was to provide a mechanism for addressing presidential misconduct or presidential abuses of power that the legal system did not provide an adequate remedy for. So we've got civil proceedings to deal with damages, we have chronal proceedings to deal with people who break the criminal law and need to be put in jail or prison. But impeachment is not really focusing on the legal answer. So the legal sanctions. It's looking at the kind misconduct
for which our legal system provides no other remedy. So, for example, if a president abuses his power, typically that's not a crime, but it does seriously injure the republic. So the focus in presidential impeachment proceedings is primarily on abuses of power or breaches the public trust that the law civil or criminal does not adequately otherwise address.
So Andrew john was the first president to be impeached.
He was the first president to face a serious impeachment effort, and as you point out, yes, he was the first American president to be formally impeached by the House of Representatives on roughly ten articles of impeachment, which if you try to summarize them, basically mean that he was impeached for trying to obstruct or impede reconstruction policy in the United States. I was the policy fashioned by Congress to control or govern the constitual state of affairs after the Civil War.
But the impeachment is sort of meant to be a punishment, right, But he didn't leave office or anything.
Well to begin with, it's not entirely clear that impeachment is meant to punish. It's designed to protect the republic from a president who is lawless or a president who is abusing his power, and the sanctions are very limited, limited to removal from office or disqualification, basically meaning ever serving again in a federal officer up the penchancy person might have otherwise earned.
Really, Trump could have had that penalty after his first or his second impeachment right of not being able to run for office again.
Yes, if the Congress had formally disqualified him, that would have precluded him from being able to seek another federal office or more particularly occupy another federal office such as the presidency.
Okay, so just making sure it was well within the range of outcomes of impeachment. If Republicans had gone along with.
That, Yes, if Republicans had supported convicting Trump either in twenty nineteen for a business of power or obstruction of justice or later for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol, if Republican senators had joined Democratic senators, they would have had enough numbers to convict him at the end of his trial and impose the sanction of either removal or disqualification.
It's so interesting, all right, Let's get back to this idea with Buchanan, who came before Johnson, they sort of tried to get it together, but there was no trial.
Right Well, Buchanan was not impeached, but he was criticized heavily at the end of his presidency for taking the position that the federal government had no power to protect itself or its federal forts from being attacked by secessionists. That was a grave sort of abuse of power. But because it was nearing the end of his presidency, I think the focus was more on Lincoln than it was ultimately on just how bad bu Canan had become.
Our modern impeachments, though, are really quite different. But then you had a long period in American history when there were no presidential impeachments.
That's correct. So after Andrew Johnson was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate, you need at least two thirds of the Senators to agree to convict, and the Senate fell one vote short of that. It was more than one hundred years before another president faced serious impeachment efforts, and that was Richard Nixon. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
With Richard Nixon, he decides to resign.
Why, I think there were a number of forces that came together. And this is actually an important lesson of the effort to impeach Richard Nixon is impeachment oftentimes is not a power that is used except for being the last resort. So there may be other processes and other efforts to try and keep the president within bounds that are failing, And with Richard Nixon, in a sense, he was running out of options. By the end of his presidency.
A special prosecutor, along with the House and the Senate, all of them had been conducting investigations of Nixon's possible misconduct, and that culminated in, among other things, a Supreme Court case Springcourt decision known as the Watergate tapes case, which the unanimous Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over taped conversations in the White House. Nixon complied with that order. Complying with that order, he turned over tape conversations that
essentially became like a smoking gun. In those conversations, it was clear Nixon had tried to order up or otherwise participate in a cover up of the break into the Democratic headquarters, but he basically had ordered and so once the Springboard made that order, then the House Judiciary Committee very quickly moved, based on two years of investigations, to approve three impeachment articles against Nixon. So he had the
springboard decision saying he had to comply turnover tapes. How Judicial Committee acted on what they learned from those tapes and other evidence they had amassed, and at that point
Nixon faced absolutely certain impeachment. He met with representatives from the House and the Senate, Republican leaders from both, and they all told him that he could not expect much support in the Senate, and in fact, that would mean he would not only be impeached by a majority in the House, but he would be convicted and removed by the Senate. And therefore Nixon realized he had no option but to resign.
So he really he saw that he didn't have the votes to stay in office.
That is correct.
Do you think that Nixon resigning created a kind of false sort of feeling that maybe Trump would resign.
I think it's a really important question, and I think Nixon's resignation led some people to believe, and they believe this for quite a long time until we got around to Clinton and Trump, that presidents would consider resigning if they faced certain and certain conviction. Another way to put that is that presidents might prefer to opt to resign rather than face the embarrassment of having a majority of the House vote to impeach and two thirds of the
Senate or more voting to convict. But another way yet to think of it is Nixon's resignation might have given rise to the belief that what we really have left as a means to address presidential from his conduct is not much the impeachment process but forced resignation, and that
falls apart. That's really just a myth that just falls apart when, for example, Bill Clinton absolutely refused to resign even though he's was impeached by the House, and Trump not once but twice refused to resign even though it was clear Trump was going to be impeached. And Clinton and Trump, I think, in a sense had the outlook that they were never going to give up, but they had fought so hard to get they were going to be forced to give it up, that is to say,
kicked out of office. But with Trump, I think there was the additional fact that I should say, actually with both Trump and Clinton, they recognized that if the members of their party stayed largely unified in the Senate that would block any conviction or removal. And that's exactly what happened.
Yeah, that's such an interesting thing. There really is an evolution, and Bill Clinton is part of that. Right that you can't compare the impeachment of bi Clinton to the impeachment of ROGERD. Nixon, Right, There wasn't a partisan aspect to Nixon's impeachment.
Well, in the beginning, there was some partisan division over it, but over time. Keep in mind there were two years of investigations in the House of the Senate before the House Judicial Committee commenced an impeaching acquirer against Nixon. So the more evidence became public of possible Nixonian misconduct, the fidelity that some Republicans might have had to put party
over principle began to sort of crumble. And when the evidence, including that last smoking gun, became public, Republicans, I think, to their credit, didn't just pretend that evidence did not exist. They recognized that there was something more important than party fidelity. They recognized that Nixon had abused his powers, and impeachrimot was the appropriate remedy to try and use to rid
the nation in a sense of his presidency. I think Republicans tried mightily during the Clinton impeachment preceding to argue, oh, Clinton was just like Nixon. In fact, Republicans used some of the same language that had been used in the articles of impeachment approved about the House Juducuy committee against Richard Nixon. But as you point out, if you look more closely at the facts Clinton and Nixon, they're not
really similar at all. Clinton's basic problem, as we all know, was that he lied under oath about the relationship he had with somebody who had once worked in the White House, and then Clinton sort of tried to hide that fact. That's a far cry from Richard Nixon, who had first tried to obstruct justice in all sorts of different ways. Secondly, Nixon had ordered the heads of various agencies to go after his political enemies. That's about as bad as president
from his comment. And then lastly, Nixon refused to comply with four legislative subpoenas. And you can't find anything in Clinton's misconduct that kind of lines up with any one of those three.
So we had two Trump impeachments the first time. Very impressive is to have you know, we have a Republican House that would like to impeach Biden. On vibes, it's clearly a progression, right, It's a sort of quid pro quo, and we don't know how much of it is driven by Trump, who actually, you know, has said publicly that he would like to see Biden impeach. It's hard to look at something like this and think that we're going
to get better. But I mean, we did have a long period between you know, we had one hundred years of no impeachment. I mean, could we have one hundred more years of no impeachment or is humanity not going to last that long?
Well? I would like to think that's possible, but I think at this point the tribalism and hyperpartisanship which characterized Congress makes that prospect quite unlikely. Even during the Trump impeachment, the first Trump impeachment, many Republicans in Congress threatened to go after the next president happened to be a Democrat.
So drumbeat to go after Biden began before he ever became president, and even after he won the presidency, there's been this drum beat as well of trying to impeach him and we've gotten to the point where the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who has a very faithful Trump devotee, has claimed that Biden is the most corrupt
leader in the history of the United States. Now, he says that after the Republican's own expert witness in the first hearing on Biden's impeachment said there's not enough evidence here to indicate that Biden's committed any impeachable offense. So there's real gap between what so called evidence shows and the rhetoric of Republicans who want to go after Biden. I believe for two reasons. One is to hurt his reelection, and the other is to gut impeachment as a serious
mechanism for presidential impeachment. Indeed, if the Republicans are successful, they will have gutted impeachment just in time for Donald Trump to regain the White House and therefore not have to face impeachment as an impediment to those things he's promising on the campaign trail, such as jailing all of his critics.
Yeah, not excited for that, speaking as a Trump critic. Thank you so much for joining us, Michael.
Thank you'spin an honor I appreciate it.
David Roberts is the editor of the newsletter called Vaults. Welcome back to Fast Politics, David.
Roberts, great to be here.
Always a delight big comp climate conference in Dubai. Where else to have a climate conference.
What happened, Well, the usual happened, which is like a big basically climate festival, dozens and dozens of groups having their little sub meetings, and basically people just go to see other people. I mean ninety percent of the stuff that goes on at those things is unrelated to the official business. So mostly it was just a big burning man for climate nerds out in the desert in the
official deliberations. Basically, the big news, which I realized might sound slightly ridiculous to people outside of this world, but the big news is that the countries of the world finally unanimously acknowledged the fact that transitioning to a clean energy economy means transitioning away from fossil fuels, which is, you know, of course, something you could know just by reading the Wikipedia entry on climate change, but it is a very big deal, you know, the oil producing nations
to say it, and there was a big fight over it. There was going to be it was going to be a phase out, then it was going to be a phase down, and then they didn't like that either. There's a lot of fighting and fighting, and they ended up with transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Don't they know this?
Everybody knows we're going to net zero, right, that's the big that's the shared the shared target. But net zero means basically where sequestering at least as much as we are emitting, right, And so the big question is how much of that is just reducing emissions and how much of that is offsetting emissions with burying carbon. And of course the big oil producers would like to continue a robust production of oil and gas and just offset it all by burying carbon, which is wild, wild, wildly and
totally unrealistic. But the question of how much offsets versus reductions is an open question and that's what all this fighting about language is ultimately about, right, all.
Right, But in the end they know they have.
To they know they have to change. I mean, Saudi Arabia is investing hugely in solar fields and you know, in hydrogen, and like everybody, you know, at this point, everybody knows what's happening. It's all we're just arguing about speed and pace and who pays and whose ox gets gored, and who gets subsidized, you know, who gets a just transition, help with the transition, and who gets stranded. It's just all you know, it's all those details, right.
Who gets some money for having their house ruined and who does that?
Yes, exactly, Like you know, the big oil producing states want to be compensated somehow for this giant loss of income, but of course, like are the Bangladeshi is going to be compensated for losing land to tsunamis, et cetera. You know, there's millions of people around the earth already who are being hurt by climate change and aren't being compensated. So you know, it's the big power players negotiating over money, which is you know what everything is in the end.
Really, this actually was a little bit better than we thought it would be, right.
Well, the fact that it was in Dubai, it was amusing to a lot of people and led by an oil chic, led a lot of people to believe that this was going to be an absolute farce of nothing, and it wasn't. So yeah, I mean, so some credit to the hosts. They held it together, and there's a lot of fighting and you know, the usual last minute everybody's sweating, staying up all night, but it did produce
something in the end war than expected. The really hilarious thing is next time around, they're having it in Azerbaijan, another giant oil producing country.
So but the reason they're doing that again, I don't want to defend anyone's ever, certainly not oil producers. But the reason why they're doing that is because they are members of COP right and they alternate who who in COP does it right?
It was supposed to be in Eastern Europe somewhere next, but Russia vetoed all those ideas basically until they got down to Azerbaijan.
But Russia is in COP too, right. It's sort of incredible.
Yeah, it's supposed to be unanimous's supposed to be all the countries of the world, and most of what they do requires unanimity, which you know, that alone should tell everybody. It's a miracle that anything ever comes out of these meetings. You know, trying to get the world's in almost two hundred countries to agree on anything is wild. So it's I mean, it's it's impressive that they've moved as far as they have.
Yeah, it is. Can we talk about methane.
Lots of people talking about methane these days.
Give me the real skinny on methane. Is methane worse than CO two?
Well, it just all depends on how you measure. CO two is much more consequential in the long term, but methane is a more active trapping of heat in the short term. So, in other words, if you want to reduce the impacts of climate change the short term impacts, methane is your short term lever, right, You got to pull the CO two lever to reduce the problem in the long term, the overall problem. But one way to have a relatively short term immediate effect is ratcheting down methane.
That gets you a pretty quick reduction in warming.
Something is clearly very fucking off, right, Because it's sixty degrees in New York City in December. I'm fucking forty five years old, so I remember winters when it's snowed and was below forty. So explain to me what the fuck is happening.
This is the problem with climate change? Is this the real political problem with climate change because the amount that it's changed already, there's nothing on the table that can undo that. For all intents and purposes, that's a permanent change. There's some chance that as we peak and reduce emissions and then go negative emissions that on some time horizon we could begin to pull temperatures back down, like maybe
in a century or something like that or two. But for our purposes, you know, people alive today, the changes are permanent. So when you ask people to work hard and make sacrifices on behalf of climate, what you're really asking them is not make this better. What you're asking them is prevent this from getting even worse than it otherwise would have, which is like a terrible political message, you know, it's like a terrible way to motivate people. So like, not only are the changes built in, but
further changes are built in. Like for us, the climate is going to be warming all of our lives. That's just a fact, no matter literally, no matter what we do.
Yeah, that's not good. The thing I am struck by is that you really have to work hard to deny climate change. At this point, it is sixty degrees in New York City in December. It is not supposed to be the same temperature in LA that it is in New York. Like that is fucking not normal. And I think that, like the people who are not being paid to deny climate change, see what's happening.
I wish that word true, but I mean, I feel like one thing we've learned in politics, especially these last ten years, is like there is no amount of empirical evidence sufficient to change people's identities and ideologies, you know what I mean that there's no pile of empirical evidence too big to ignore if you want to ignore it, right. I mean, it's funny like some of the sort of Republicans, sort of the official moderate Republicans are just around now
as solutions to climate change. They've moved beyond denial and they're impeding action in other ways. But down in the grass roots, down in the MAGA grass roots, it's still old school, full on a head in the sand denialism. It hasn't changed at all of anything. Outright Denihalism is sort of catching on because it's all just part of their sort of tribal identity. It's a cultish and anyone who's ever dealt with a cult can tell you, like
you can send them all the citations you want. You know what I mean, like highlight the passages, underlining the right passages, it doesn't matter, like they are what they are, but they don't matter anymore. I mean, as evidenced by the fact I think that the entire world is gathering and acknowledging this and working on this, like the train has left the station. It's just like, how big of an impediment is the US going to be versus a help? Is the real question?
Like my husband said this thing to me, which I thought was interesting that he read that the countries where climate change denialism is the worst are country is with a lot of oil, and they're largely the United States in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, one thing that people need to wrap their heads around is that it's a relatively small handful of countries producing oil. The vast majority of the world's nations are oil imporders, and so oil is just like getting off of oil would be nothing but a boon for all
of those countries. Right, It's a relatively small handful of extremely powerful countries that are going to get hung up on those But this, yes, it shows you that that when you have powerful interests, you can make up reasons to believe what you need to believe when you have an incentive to do so, right, I mean, humans are very very good at them.
But I also feel like the larger sort of override is that propaganda works.
Yes, it absolutely works. But the only offsetting thing I'd say, and I really like my only source of optimism these days, if I'm being honest, is that the technologies to produce energy from sun and when renewable, to produce to produce energy without carbon emissions are cheap and getting cheaper, and ultimately physics will out like people will go to the thing that works better and is cleaner, and is cheaper and is easier to finance, and is easier to build
and faster to build, et cetera, et cetera. So that hide is unstoppable. So you know, propaganda can can make people believe all kinds of crazy things, but there are some sort of forces that it can't push back. And at this point, this is something I say all the time, Like when everything was fossil fuels, It's like a fish in water, right, you can't really assess the quality of the water. You don't know anything else. But now that there are alternatives, it's just becoming clearer and clear to
people the longer they think about it. While fossil fuels are a crappy deal in a lot of ways that were just invisible because they were ubiquitous. But if we have a choice, then why would we do it this way? Right? And just that's an unstoppable tide rolling across the earth, Like, it's just faster and cheaper to do things cleanly, so it serves no one's interests, but powerful fossil fuel incumbents to slow this thing down, it will benefit everyone else.
Yeah, give me like two more things. What are you excited about?
I'm excited about all kinds of things. I mean, the real interesting phenomenon over the last ten years, Like the first ten years I covered this thing, everything was about climate basically because solutions were obscure or very expensive or in the lab or no one had even dreamed them up. Yet no one knew them at all, So it was a very abstract, very political, very sort of ideological yelling
back and forth about climate. But now the world has turned its energies in earnest to finding solutions to these things. And so now it's just become a big puzzle, like how do we replace this piece? How do we replace this piece? How do we replace this piece? And all these swarms and swarms of clever people are descending on these problems one at a time and coming up with clever solutions to things that just a few years ago we would have said we're either impossible or very difficult
to decarbonize. Now people are cracking those things. Like we have a whole set of sectors that used to be called not very long ago, difficult to decarbonize, right, things like cement and steel. But now like every time I turn on my computer, I hear about a new team and a lab somewhere or a new startup somewhere that's coming up with some new clever solutions. So we're going to solve cement, We're going to solve steel, We're going to solve shipping, you know, we're going to solve cars,
we're going to solve heating. Like, piece by piece is all coming together, and just on an intellectual level, watching that puzzle be solved in real time is just fascinating. It's just intellectually fascinating watching this happen It's so much more concrete than these sort of sloganeering about climate back and forth, you know what I mean. It's just so much more tangible to be involved, people like, Okay, like we need to replace this molecule with this molecule, How
do we do it? You know, it's just so much more you can wrap your hands around it.
I feel like you're not totally despairing. And I don't even know what to make of having a climate guest who is not totally despairing. You sound like Mac Greenfield, my long suffering spouse, who's like, technology can solve a lot of these problems, and I'm always like, no, they can't.
The lesson is this was always going to be less difficult technologically than we thought in advance. And I feel like that's true. Like throughout human history we're like, oh, this problem looks big and insoluble, and like once you get in dig in around now you find technological solutions. It's not technology that was ever going to be the problem, right, it's politics and politics are always the opposite. They're always more difficult than you think they're going to be. They're
always slower. So that's I mean, if you want me to unleash some despair. We can just talk about politics for a while. I've got but I've got plenty.
No, no, no, I have enough despair for both of us.
The technology makes me happy, and all it is now is doing the political and social fighting and thinking and reforming necessary to put those technologies out in the field. That's the job now. It's not an easy job, like there's going to be no sector that's easy to decarbonize politically, They're all going to be a fight. And people think like, oh, we just have to overcome oil companies, but no, like
big beef. I mean, the fight against big beef is going to make the fight against oil look like Patty Gigs, I think. And then there's the whole sprawl complex in the US and somewhat in other countries too, just highways, strip walls, big commercial developers, all of them are going to be a fight. You run your society on fossil fuels for a couple hundred years, you end up with a lot of incumbents, a lot of powerful forces clinging to them. So it's just going to be battle after battle.
There's never going to be a like crest the Hill and coast It's going to be a fight for all of our lives, but the technology is making that fight much, much, much much easier.
Yeah, that's right. So interesting, David Roberts.
I hope you'll come back.
I would love to.
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