A comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms of impeachment, providing context for recent events.
A well-informed look at a crucial safeguard against the abuse of power.
The impeachment of a president veers between a serious constitutional issue and hyperbolic political theater. Gerhardt is a respected professor of jurisprudence and the author of a series of books on constitutional law and legacy. In his latest book, he seeks to explain the legal principles and procedures involved in the impeachment process. The provision that the conviction of a president in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority has meant, in practice, that no president has been convicted. The closest was Nixon, who resigned when it became clear that enough Republicans in the Senate were willing to vote to remove him. Since that time, there has been no real possibility that a president would be convicted, despite Trump’s two impeachments. No matter the evidence, it seems, neither party will let the other win. This was the case with Clinton and with Trump (both times). An impeachment vote by the House, where only a simple majority is needed, might have symbolic value, but symbolism is the last resort of the unconvincing. Gerhardt often lets his disdain of Trump show through, and in the section on his second impeachment, the author’s dispassionate tone dissipates. He largely dismisses a crucial point about the House vote: that it took place with no committee investigation and minimal debate. This is an important precedent, and it deserved more attention. Gerhardt insists that the Senate trial was legal—although Chief Justice Roberts apparently disagreed—even though Trump was no longer president. Yes, it might have been legal, but despite Trump’s antics and lack of decorum, it seemed pointless at the time. The book is a useful reference, but more restraint from the author would have made it much better.
A comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms of impeachment, providing context for recent events.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781479824694
Page Count: 200
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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