Opinion > Columnists > Davis Merritt

Posted on Tue, Feb. 03, 2009

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Impeachment was a political decision

Most people would just as soon hear no more about Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor rightfully dispatched by his state's legislature to the political netherworld.

But a few more things need to be understood about what happened, because news coverage of the Illinois spectacle was so sloppy.

It's possible that in today's expanded media environment a few journalists understood what was happening and reported it accurately, but if that is so, I did not see those reports.

The central but largely unreported fact of the soap opera that unreeled over several weeks is that in Illinois, the legislature can toss out the governor for any reason or no reason at all.

The state's constitution is different from, say, the constitutions of the United States and Kansas, which specify treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors as causes for impeachment. Impeaching a president or a Kansas governor requires presentation of evidence that the executive's actions reached those levels of offense. It's at least a quasijudicial process.

But because the Illinois Constitution specifies how to impeach but expresses no criteria for doing so, impeachment there is purely a political matter. If a sufficient number of legislators decide they don't want you to be governor anymore, you're not. In Blagojevich's case, that was all but one of 118 representatives (his sister-in-law) and all 59 senators.

The fact that Blagojevich faced multiple felony charges based on FBI wiretaps of his phones so mesmerized reporters that they consistently confused the state's no-cause-needed impeachment process with a criminal trial and fuzzed the difference between "illegal" and "wrong."

The desperate governor took advantage of that reportorial blind spot and the media's hunger for sensational interview "gets." On numerous networks, he whined about due process and not being able to call witnesses or defend himself, all the while refusing to defend himself in the appropriate forum.

He kept insisting that he "did nothing wrong."

He was wrong about that.

On the obscenity-laced tapes, he talks about trading the state's vacant U.S. Senate seat for campaign money, withholding state aid to get Chicago Tribune editorial writers fired, paying off racetrack campaign donors with legislation and dozens of other shady dealings.

Whether any of that was illegal is a matter of fact and law that a court will decide in the future. Bombastic talk is one thing. Acting on it is another, which will have to be demonstrated to a jury's satisfaction.

But Illinois legislators didn't have to concern themselves with legalisms or action.

"The tapes speak for themselves," Blagojevich declared in his last-ditch, take-no-questions appeal to the legislature.

It was a foolish, perhaps Freudian, statement, because whether or not he did anything illegal, the things he talked about were wrong and not likely to make Illinois citizens and legislators confident and proud.

And that's all the legislature needed.

But then he added something even more foolish: You know that's just the way politicians operate, he told the politicians who were to decide his fate. The wink in his delivery was palpable.

Case closed.

It was a no-brainer, purely political decision. It's regrettable but all too indicative of today's weakened journalistic reality that it was presented as more complex and portentous than it was.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.