Removing bad presidents from office should be easier

In the view of the impeachment clause that currently dominates the legal academy, there’s essentially no way to remove a president for misbehavior, neglect or incompetence. During the Clinton imbroglio, scads of concerned law professors dutifully advanced an interpretation of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” lenient enough to let Bill skate. They drew a line between “public” and “private”: Abuse and corruption related to the exercise of presidential power are impeachable; private misdeeds (like perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up an affair) are not. The always-reliable Cass Sunstein provided the unintentional reductio ad absurdum to this line of reasoning, arguing in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that if the president were to up and “murder someone simply because he does not like him,” it would make for a “hard case.”

But as law professor Sanford Levinson puts it, “Why in the world should ‘We the People’ not be able to break the lease and evict a manifestly unsuitable or incompetent president and replace him with someone presumably more able?”

Levinson favors a constitutional amendment allowing a congressional “no confidence” vote and removal of the president. Adding that “safety valve” to the Constitution would be a longshot, to say the least.