Remember when impeachment used to feel rare, almost historic? I do. It was the kind of thing you read about in civics textbooks, something reserved for the most extreme betrayals of public trust. These days it feels more like the political equivalent of calling someone a mean name on social media: loud, instant, and usually gone by next week.
And yet here we are again, barely a month into a new administration, and the “I-word” is already trending. Lawmakers are drafting articles, cable hosts are thundering about immediate removal, and the usual suspects are insisting that this time, this time, the offenses are simply too grave to ignore.
The Hammer Looking for Another Nail
There’s an old saying in the military: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. For a certain wing of American politics, impeachment has become that hammer. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the target is a twice-impeached former president who just won re-election or a freshly confirmed cabinet secretary, someone is always warming up the impeachment engine.
The latest round centers on two very different controversies. One involves the new Secretary of Defense and his use of an encrypted messaging app during military operations. The other revolves around blunt, some would say ugly, remarks the president made about a specific immigrant community. Both have been instantly elevated to “impeachable offense” status by critics. Both, upon closer inspection, look remarkably thin.
The Signal App Scandal That Wasn’t Quite
First, the technology angle. Reports surfaced that battlefield updates and orders, including sensitive operational details, were shared on commercial encrypted apps rather than official hardened channels. The Pentagon’s own inspector general flagged the practice as risky. Critics pounced: this is reckless, dangerous, maybe even criminal.
Fair enough, the concern isn’t frivolous. Secure communications matter when lives are on the line. But the same report that raised the alarm also found no evidence that classified information was compromised in these particular instances, and no indication that adversaries gained any advantage. In other words, a procedural screw-up, not a catastrophe.
More importantly, this is hardly the first administration to stumble on tech policy. Private email servers, unsecured phones, WhatsApp diplomacy, remember those? Some of those cases were arguably far more careless. Yet no one seriously suggested impeachment for cabinet officials in prior administrations over similar lapses.
Process mistakes in secure communications are serious, but they have never been treated as high crimes and misdemeanors before. Suddenly they are?
The leap from “this should have been handled better” to “remove him from office” feels less like constitutional principle and more like political opportunism.
The Boat Strike and the Collapsing War-Crimes Narrative
The second accusation against the Defense Secretary is dramatically darker: that he personally ordered troops to machine-gun survivors of a disabled drug-running boat in open water, essentially a war crime.
The story exploded across front pages, complete with anonymous sources and grainy video. For about forty-eight hours it looked damning. Then the timeline started falling apart.
Major outlets that initially ran with the most incendiary version have quietly walked key claims back. No order to deliberately kill survivors appears to have been given. The additional fire was directed at a vessel that was still afloat and potentially salvageable, along with its cargo, standard practice in counter-narcotics operations when you’re trying to make sure the drugs actually sink.
Is it possible the second or third burst was excessive? Sure. Military decisions in the heat of the moment are easy to second-guess from an air-conditioned studio. But the legal reality is straightforward: if a commander has the authority to destroy a vessel (and presidents of both parties have long asserted that authority outside U.S. territorial waters), then ensuring the vessel is fully disabled falls well within traditional rules of engagement.
- Historical naval engagements are full of “finishing shots” to prevent enemy ships from being repaired or salvaged.
- Aerial bombardments routinely involve multiple passes on targets that remain dangerous.
- The laws of war prohibit targeting survivors solely to kill them, not suppressing a legitimate military objective.
None of this excuses sloppy optics or poor judgment if either occurred. It does, however, place the incident light-years away from the constitutional threshold for removing a cabinet officer.
When Harsh Words Become “Impeachable Moments”
The other impeachment drumbeat is even more revealing. A president made sweeping negative comments about an immigrant community, comments many found offensive, even racist. Within hours commentators were on air declaring it an “impeachable moment.”
Let’s be crystal clear: painting entire groups with a broad brush is ugly politics and worse leadership. I’ve criticized similar rhetoric in the past and will again. But since when does being a jerk, even a racially insensitive jerk, equal a high crime or misdemeanor?
American presidents have said appallingly crude things about whole categories of citizens for as long as we’ve had presidents. Some of those statements are taught in history classes today as low points in our national story. None triggered impeachment.
If offensive speech about domestic groups were suddenly impeachable, the line outside the House Judiciary Committee would stretch around the Capitol ten times over, and it would include figures from both parties.
The standard isn’t “I’m really mad about what he said.” The standard is betrayal of the Constitution itself. Conflating the two doesn’t strengthen our institutions; it trivializes them.
The Real Calendar Driving the Frenzy
Perhaps the most telling is the timing. These calls aren’t emerging in a vacuum. Midterm elections are less than two years away. Control of the House is up for grabs. And history shows that nothing energizes a disgruntled base quite like the spectacle of impeachment.
We’ve seen this movie before. The moment one party loses unified control of government, the impeachment machinery whirs to life. It happened after 2010, after 2014, after 2018, and again after 2024. The script rarely changes: find the most emotionally charged accusation available, declare it obviously impeachable, and dare the other side to defend the indefensible.
Sometimes the accusations stick. Most of the time they flame out, leaving the public more cynical than before. Either way, the institutional damage accumulates.
What the Constitution Actually Says (and Doesn’t Say)
The framers were deliberate when they wrote the impeachment clause. Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. They knew presidents would be unpopular. They knew cabinets would make mistakes. They knew politics would be rough and tumble.
That’s why they set the bar deliberately high. If they had wanted impeachment to be a routine no-confidence vote, they would have written it that way. They didn’t.
Lowering that bar doesn’t make Congress more powerful. It makes the executive more vulnerable to whichever faction happens to hold a temporary majority, and it makes the entire government less stable. In the long run, nobody wins.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat for years now, and honestly it’s exhausting. Every cycle we inch closer to treating impeachment like a parliamentary censure motion instead of the nuclear option it was designed to be. At some point we have to ask: are we still a constitutional republic, or are we just taking turns wielding the hammer?
Because if everything is impeachable, then ultimately nothing is.
