President Trump is likely just a few weeks away from becoming only the third president in American history to be impeached. The vote to impeach the president is expected to occur primarily along party lines. Also likely is the fact that the Republican-controlled Senate will not vote by two-thirds of its members to convict Trump. This likely scenario will result in two outcomes:  First, impeaching Trump will become a partisan exercise. Second, while impeachment will be a blemish on the Trump presidency, he maybe able to overcome its consequences by being reelected in 2020. Both of these outcomes (partisanship and the inability to remove the president from office) will dilute the importance of the impeachment process and undermine its role as an effective legislative tool to punish future presidents for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The above scenario will be somewhat similar to the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, when Republicans abused the impeachment process to punish a president for lying about a consensual extramarital affair with a White House intern. At the end of the day Clinton completed his second term in office and was fairly popular when his tenure ended in 2000.

The danger here is twofold:  For one, impeachment may become viewed, not as an exceptional and rarely used process to hold a sitting president accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors, but as a routine partisan exercise to score political points against opponents for less serious offenses. Second, there is a real threat that impeachment maybe used to settle disagreements over executive powers and the overall role of the executive branch. The possibility exists that impeachment may ultimately become as common as other legislative procedures such as a filibuster.

What to do with Trump

Over the past three years it has become obvious that Donald Trump is a flawed human being. Trump’s term in office thus far has revealed that he:

• Doesn’t fully grasp the ethics of holding public office;
• Views the powers of the presidency as near absolute;
• Blurs the lines between the president’s official authority and his personal interests; and
• Is dismissive of facts and realities that do not suit his interests or views of the world.

As such, President Trump has engaged is what many people thought unimaginable by a U.S. president, including:

• Leading chants and threatening to jail his political opponents;
• Calling for investigations into his political opponents;
• Soliciting help from foreign governments to further his political goals;
• Hiring both his daughter and her husband as senior advisors;
• Criticizing independent bodies, including judges, the FBI, CIA and even the Federal Reserve Bank;
• Encouraging American and foreign officials to lodge at his hotels; and
• Trying to host the G-7 Summit at his own resort in Florida.

President Trump does not seem to want to deal with the legal or ethical constraints that are part of holding public office. As such, it’s up to Congress to put the breaks on the president and remind him that he is a public servant in a constitutional republic, not an absolute monarch.

One way for Congress to express its disapproval of the president’s actions and rhetoric is through the act of censure, which would likely attract more Republican votes and not require a two-thirds vote in the Senate.

Reagan, H.W. Bush and Trump

While President Trump clearly deserves to be reprimanded for his actions and rhetoric, other contemporary presidents have seemingly gotten away with far more.

For instance, President Reagan twice was given a pass over questionable and more serious actions. In 1980, it was purported that the Reagan campaign struck a secret deal with Iran to postpone the release of American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in order to hurt President Carter’s reelection chances. While these are just persistent allegations, they definitely should have warranted a formal investigation.

President Reagan again was involved in an Iran-related scandal in 1985, aka the Iran-Contra Affair, when his administration violated U.S. law by selling weapons to Iran and directing proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, who were trying to overthrow the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime. Both actions were in violation of U.S. laws (there was an arms embargo against Iran and a congressional prohibition against sending funds to the Contra rebels).

However, there were no attempts to impeach, or even censure, the popular and aging president.

Then there is the case of President George H.W. Bush, whose administration misled Congress and the American people and effectively doctored evidence to support his claims that Iraq possessed illegal chemical weapons. These claims were a pretext for the Iraq war, which claimed the lives of thousands of American soldiers, the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and the wasting of hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Not to mention the political vacuum created by the removal of Saddam Hussein, a vacuum that is mostly being filled by Iran.

Despite the serious consequences of H.W. Bush’s administration, there were never any serious attempts to ever hold him responsible for his reckless actions.

So, should Trump, as imperfect as he is, be impeached for trying to pressure a foreign leader to open an investigation into a political opponent?  There is no question that Trump’s approach to Ukraine is inappropriate and may even be a violation of campaign finance laws. But does it fall under the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors? Probably not.