Word: treasonable
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...Treason and bribery, it was readily agreed during the debate on the Constitution, would be obvious grounds for impeaching a President. What else? "Abusing his power," Edmund Randolph of Virginia suggested. James Madison favored protection against "incapacity, negligence or perfidy in the chief magistrate." But when George Mason proposed adding "maladministration" to treason and bribery, Madison thought the word "so vague as to be equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate." Borrowing a catchall phrase from English usage, Mason thereupon substituted "high crimes and misdemeanors." Without debate, this curious phrase, which has bedeviled political discourse ever since...
Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn's example may in fact hearten rather than discourage Russia's libertarians. Last week Sakharov and nine other prominent dissenters issued an impassioned defense of Solzhenitsyn's actions: "His so-called 'treason' consists of his disclosure to the whole world, with shattering force, of the monstrous crimes committed in the U.S.S.R. not very long ago." They demanded the publication of Gulag in the Soviet Union and called for an international investigation of the crimes against innocent Soviet citizens...
...questioned about supplies, but Jackson asked him instead what Exxon's per-share dividends were. Baze did not know, and Jackson made a grandstand show of phoning a Washington stockbroker for the information. Last week an overwrought writer of a letter to the New York Times accused Exxon of "treason" for not supplying the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean during the Middle East
...precedent is a guide, the President has ample reason not to show up in person. As Judge Ringer noted: "U.S. v. Burr is commanding." At the time of the 1807 treason trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr, President Thom as Jefferson informed the Government attorney that he would not appear in court to testify, arguing that the separation-of-powers principle did not permit him to get involved in a series of court proceedings. But when Chief Justice John Marshall issued a subpoena or dering Jefferson to produce a batch of letters and documents, he submitted some of them...
...public irresolution traces, in part, to the vague and frightening aspects of the impeachment process. The impeachment clause of the U.S. Constitution is too ambiguous to be easily employed. It is clear enough that a President can be impeached for treason or bribery, but what is to be made of "other high Crimes and Misdemeanors"? The phrase was a compromise arrived at by the founding fathers after considerable debate, but it was only dimly understood then-or since. Not long after the phrase was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, the British, who invented it to encompass both criminal acts...