Hillsdale College VP: Democrats’ Impeachment Could Make It ‘Disappear as a Legitimate Constitutional Option’

Hillsdale College Vice President Dr. Matthew Spalding told Breitbart News that he worries the Democrats’ using impeachment as a “political tool” with regards to President Donald Trump could result in impeachment “disappear[ing] as a legitimate, constitutional option.” Dr. Spalding spoke to host Alex Marlow in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

Spalding said that he believes “there will be a pulling back from impeachment” in the future now that the Democrats have cheapened the word by using the process as a partisan political tool.

“I think what we’re likely to see,” said Spalding, “is that there will be a pulling back from impeachment, which on the one hand, weakens impeachment as a political tool — which in the narrow sense, I think is good, it shouldn’t be partisanized the way it happened this time — but I do worry that impeachment disappears as a legitimate, constitutional option.”

Listen below:

“We’ve seen what a very partisan impeachment looks like,” added the Hillsdale vice president, “and in hindsight, looking back, one could argue — although I think there’s more to it than this — that the impeachment for Clinton was the opposite version of that.”

“We’ll see what happens when the next majority comes in with an objectionable president,” said Spalding. “You don’t want to impeach a president merely because you don’t like him, you think they have a bad character, they say wrong things, you disagree with their policies.”

Spalding went on to mention that the Democrats have “failed” in their attempt to use impeachment as a political tool, adding that they have only weakened themselves in the process.

“They’ve used what is a legal, constitutional mechanism to check the president as a political tool and failed to do so,” he said. “I think they’ve actually weakened themselves politically, and now I think we’re back to politics. We’ve moved on, people have forgotten, it’s not being discussed in Iowa, and it was a major strategic mistake on their part.”

Spalding also shared his take on Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA)’s closing remarks, in which the Congressman argued that President Trump is not “decent.”

I think that kind of reveals it for exactly what it is — that’s a political argument, that’s an argument appropriate for a campaign, that’s campaign rhetoric. That’s not the argument for a constitutional process called impeachment. And so, I think these moments, we step back, we see it for what it is.

This move of impeachment was not a legal argument. It was not a constitutional argument. It was not a tactical argument. It was the House — controlled by a very engaged, partisan majority — engaging in a political argument, and using that tool to make a political argument looking forward to a campaign and future campaigns.

“That is not the way it was designed,” he added, “and in many ways, it was designed to fail, because the Senate checks the passions of the House, which is exactly what happened.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.