Joseph Sabino Mistick: Alexander Hamilton's thoughts on impeachment

If you are one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason, the popular resurgence of Alexander Hamilton over the past two decades must make perfect sense these days.

“Alexander Hamilton,” Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of one of our nation’s founders and the first secretary of the Treasury, spent months on The New York Times best-seller list. And Chernow’s book was the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and produced “Hamilton,” the Tony and Grammy award-winning musical that also won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

But all that was a prelude to Hamilton’s most recent center-stage appearance at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Hamilton might as well be in the room, since both the presidency and the impeachment trial bear his mark. And it is all playing out in the well of the Senate, as he said it should.

Hamilton believed that government was supposed to get things done for the people it promised to serve. He knew that the nation needed to build its infrastructure. Where markets didn’t exist, he created them. He believed in a central bank, and he wanted a strong military.

To get this done, he argued for a vigorous chief executive with broad powers, and he got that. But he was also a political realist who designed constitutional procedures to curb those broad powers when they are abused.

Hamilton strongly believed in checks and balances, and his plan gave the president the power to veto acts of Congress when it overstepped. But he balanced that with a provision that gave Congress the power to impeach a president who overstepped.

In an October 2019 Washington Post essay, Chernow wrote that Hamilton never wanted impeachment to be “used lightly or capriciously, but neither did he want it relegated to mere window dressing.”

And window dressing is all that we are getting.

Some senators — the jurors in an impeachment trial — publicly announced before the trial began that they had already decided the case. And after those announcements, they “solemnly” took the required oaths required of impartial jurors.

From the beginning of the investigation, subpoenas for relevant documents have been ignored or met with a bald claim of executive privilege. It’s as though all those public documents are the property of one man, not the American people.

And all requests to call witnesses — even those with firsthand knowledge of the president’s actions — have been summarily denied.

Hamilton may have hoped for the best but he was prepared for the worst. As Chernow wrote, Hamilton “dreaded most the advent of a populist demagogue who would profess friendship for the people and pander to their prejudices while secretly betraying them. Such a false prophet would foment political frenzy and try to feed off the confusion.”

And Hamilton predicted how some of our politicians would respond. In Federalist No. 15, he warned of “a spirit of faction, which is apt to mingle its poison in the deliberations of all bodies of men.”

Now we will see if a fair trial, an earnest search for the truth, is too much to expect from every senator who has sworn to “support and defend the Constitution.”