Maurice Hinchey: “The right of the people to elect their President, and the right of Congress to remove him are competing rights.…”

“The right of the people to elect their President, and the right of Congress to remove him are competing rights. America's founding fathers knew this. They worried out loud at the Constitutional Convention that if they didn't carefully limit the idea of an impeachable offense, Congress, not Presidential elections, would be deciding who sits in the White House. So on the day the founders defined an impeachable offense, they declared their unanimous intention to limit high crimes and misdemeanors to be actions against the United States. Not private misconduct, unrelated to the operation of government, not sexual misconduct or even lies to cover it up. If there can be any doubt about the founders' intentions, they gave us plenty of proof during George Washington's first term as President when Congress was investigating the financial affairs of his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. Three Members of Congress, including future President James Monroe, confronted Hamilton about payments he had been secretly making to James Reynolds, a convicted securities swindler. Hamilton was forced to admit the payments, but explained them as hush money to avoid public disclosure of adultery he had been committing with James Reynolds' wife.”