The founders never envisioned partisanship as it exists today.
The founders did not create some magical system of government that withstands min/maxing rational actors exploiting the rules to their fullest effect. It was not created with modern understanding of game theory and creating a contingency and safeguard for every possible scenario. The entirety of US law amounts to nothing but inconvenient hurdles that would do little but slow down anyone who had critical mass and the will to tear up the constitution and create an authoritarian dystopia. Get enough clout and you can go nuclear and change the rules, rewrite the constitution, make the law anything you want, and then exterminate the minority party.
Government only functions insofar as there is a degree of mutual spirit of democracy and respect for the ideals of checks and balances, will of the majority respecting the rights of the minority, etc etc. Only once in US history has that spirit reached the breaking point and been severed, and it was partisanship taken to its extreme that brought us there, and a whole lot of blood that brought us back.
If you're designing the rules for a computer game like Diablo 2, you need to expect that malicious actors will attempt to break it in every way possible and seek out every weakness and exploit to its fullest. Leave even a crack and someone will figure out a dupe method, or rollback, or crash the servers. They need to have layered safeguards, human intervention, sanity caps, etc etc. And even so, people break it all the time. Bots and dupes run rampant. The founding fathers writing down rules on a sheet of paper they dreamed up while binge drinking and quarreling over half-baked ideals of radically disparate philosophies, was never going to stop determined partisans of the future from breaking the system. I don't think anyone can dream up such a system of government, with modern technology or not. I think its an impossible task. Either the people and their representatives are capable of settling differences, or they're not.
When it comes to impeachment, I think Paul Wellstone said it best 20 years ago;
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Let us resolve to learn the lessons of this long, sad year. Let us learn now, having come this far, the wisdom of the founders that impeachment is and must be a high barricade, not to be mounted lightly. Let us learn that because it requires the overwhelming support of the Senate to succeed, it cannot and should not proceed on a merely partisan basis. Let us learn that the desire to impeach and remove must be shared broadly, or it is illegitimate.
Let us learn that the subject matter of impeachment must be a matter of great gravity, calling into question the President's very ability to lead, and endangering the nation's liberty, freedom, security. Let us learn that the case against the President must be a strong and unambiguous one in fact and in law, for even a President deserves the benefit of our reasonable doubts.
The charges brought against President Clinton do not rise to those levels. And even if they did, the case against him is neither strong nor unambiguous. As the White House defense team has made clear, there are ample grounds for doubt about both the facts and law surrounding each of the two articles before us.
It is true that the impeachment process has further alienated millions of Americans from their government, and that is a tragic harm for which the President bears considerable responsibility. It is also true, as we were told by Chairman Hyde yesterday, that the nobility and fragility of a self-governing people requires hard work, every day, to get it right, to fight the good fight, to discern the common good. But I believe, unlike him, that it is the impeachment process itself, both here and in the other body--its partisanship, its meanness and unfairness, its leadership by those who want to win too badly--which has increased people's cynicism; not the prospect of the President's 'getting away' with something.
Our nation was founded on the Jeffersonian principle, 'that government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.' What Jefferson and the other Founders feared was the warning of their counterpart Rousseau: 'As soon as any man says of the affairs of State 'What does it matter to me?' the state may be given up as lost.' But while the many signs of disaffection among our people are growing, I do not think we have reached the point of no return; there is time in this Congress to recover from this episode, and to move on.
Despite the claims of pundits that Americans have simply tuned out, I think a deeper reality is present in their reactions, and in the polls. In fact, most Americans, in their wisdom, have reached a subtle, sophisticated judgment in this case, and have already moved beyond it. As is so often the case, they're way ahead of Washington. It is true that they abhor the President's behavior, but don't believe it merits his removal. In addition, they believe that there are larger issues facing the nation than the misdeeds that nearly all now concede the President committed: peace in the Middle East; the hunger of children; the health of Americans; saving our social security safety net; debating whether hundreds of billions of dollars of surplus should go to bolster Medicare, or to some combination of universal savings accounts or tax cuts. These are the things that the people sent us here to work on. These are the things that I hear about when I return to my state.
So let us now bring to a close, with our votes, this long, sad year of investigation and impeachment. And let us resolve that there shall be many a year before we have another one like it. It is time for our country to pull together to seek an end to the fractious partisanship that has defined this period, and to re-engage a full-throated, genuine debate about our nation's future that can help us find again that common ground that unites us as Americans, and that can serve as a firm foundation for resolving the many serious problems that still face our country--impeachment or not--today and tomorrow.