Madison, the scholarly Princeton graduate, a generation younger than Mason at age 36, saw a threat to the balance of powers he’d helped devise. “So vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate,” he argued.

In other words, Madison feared the Senate would use the word “maladministration” as an excuse to remove the president whenever it wanted. So Mason offered a substitute: “other high crimes and misdemeanors against the State.”

The English Parliament had included a similarly worded phrase in its articles of impeachment since 1450. This compromise satisfied Madison and most of the other Convention delegates. They approved Mason’s amendment without further debate, 8 states to 3, but added “against the United States,” to avoid ambiguity.

Unfortunately for everyone who’s argued since about what an impeachable offense is, the convention’s Committee on Style and Revision, which was supposed to improve the draft Constitution’s language without changing its meaning, deleted the phrase “against the United States.” Without that phrase, which explained what constitutes “high crimes,” many Americans came to believe that “high crimes” literally meant only crimes identified in criminal law.

In their attempts to justify their obsession of removing president Trump from office in lieu of elections, our Constitution is cited as if it mandates our House of Representatives to use the articles of Impeachment.    What this excuse clearly demonstrate is how ignorant are our elected representatives of our main law.    Our framers were fully cognizant that any edict written would not account for inevitable future society changes.   

Because of this awareness and their intent of writing a set of statutes that could be followed and able to be adapted to future requirements, they established a set of principles leaving many details of process to future generations.    So, the best way to understand this legal masterpiece is to read the arguments that preceded the final decisions.    The most important belief in our Constitution is that the power of life and how to regulate it should be in the hands of the people, and the elected officials would only serve them, not demand.   

This was assured by the separation of powers, check and balances, and elections.     If you study their arguments when realizing that an elected official should be by his malfeasance removed from office before the scheduled election, it is clear that in the end they wanted this process to be extremely rare, and difficult to achieve.   

More than staying with a “bad apple” until the citizens decided through elections, they feared an all powerful Congress that would subvert the regular process.    Even if “treason, bribery and/or other high crimes and misdemeanors” are not clearly defined it is obvious they meant extremely dangerous acts against the United States.    This highly political Congress failed to prove “collusion”, in itself not a crime, and “obstruction of Justice vs. Muller investigation”, so now they are using the Latin “Quid pro quo” as if it were a crime, or abuse of power based on the same principle.     

Now, in order to be clearly understood by the AOC’s of this world, their followers and the parrots of CNN, MSNBC, and et.al. I will make this latest impeachment sham extremely easy to understand.    Quid pro Quo in English is bartering, a behavior done by everyone that bought anything, a simple exchange of one object, $$$, for another.    Now let’s go to Trump/Ukraine.    Trump, a farmer goes to Ukraine’s president, another one.    Trump tells the Ukrainian “I want your cow”; the man does not answer or asks for anything in return.   

Trump was, because of his being richer and more powerful, considering giving the other man 10 goats.    He did not tell him, but there are rumors that some associates did tell him of that, but much after the original conversation.    Now let us say that Trump said “I would like you to investigate farmer #3, my competitor that is being said steals sheep”.     

Nothing offered in exchange, no barter done.    The tale ended when the farmer kept his cow, did not act against farmer #3, and received 10 sheep.    Nothing to impeach, just hearsay, allegations and false statements.    So now it was “abuse of power” based on a testimony of a decorated vet that said Trump had demanded the cow, but when confronted admitted it was only implied because of his being more powerful.   

Unfortunately for the deranged anti-Trump people, the cow was never given, so the reasoning is gone.    Pelosi, a very able politician will have to make a decision on whether to continue, with the MSM’s help, this farce or face the voters that will see trough this one sided investigation and let the accusation die in the Senate.

Fernando J. Milanes, MD