“We’re not looking for regime change [in Iran]. I want to make that clear,” President Trump said Monday at a news conference in Japan, “nobody wants to see terrible things happen, especially me.” That’s good to hear, but has Trump’s National Security Advisor gotten the message?
It’s the undeterrable John Bolton, after all, who’s been at the epicenter of the rumors of war plaguing Washington in recent weeks. It’s Bolton who ordered up a Pentagon plan for “retaliatory and offensive options” to check Iran, including a 120,000 troop surge to the region, and Bolton who blustered that a recent carrier‐strike‐group deployment signaled America’s willingness to meet any Iranian challenge with “unrelenting force.”
Trump is said to be frustrated by his aide’s brinksmanship, privately cracking that “if it was up to John, we’d be in four wars now.” “In recent days,” the New York Times reports this morning, “the disconnect between Mr. Trump and his national security adviser has spilled over into public,” with the president undercutting Bolton on Iran and North Korea. But Bolton still has his job. Ironically enough, it turns out that the longtime “Apprentice” host is gun‐shy about firing people.
Is there anything Congress can do about a rogue presidential appointee that the president won’t fire? The progressive foreign‐policy group Win Without War has an interesting proposal: they’re running a petition drive: “Tell Congress: Impeach John Bolton!”
Can Bolton be impeached? The answer turns on whether the National Security Advisor is one of the “civil Officers of the United States” to which Article II, sec. 4 applies. The term isn’t defined in the Constitution, and there’s little precedent to go on, the House having impeached just one executive‐branch official below the presidential level in 230 years: Gilded‐Age Secretary of War William Belknap. As the Congressional Research Service notes, it’s something of an open question “whether Congress may impeach and remove subordinate, non‐Cabinet level executive branch officials.”
Still, the fact that Bolton, unlike a Cabinet secretary, doesn’t hold a Senate‐confirmed position is a technicality that shouldn’t protect him, especially when it’s clear—even to the president—that his recklessness might drag us into an unnecessary war. Impeachment arose in England as a means of striking ministers close to the Crown, including those who gave “pernicious” foreign policy advice. Early American constitutional commentators like William Rawle and Justice Joseph Story believed the power extended to “all” federal executive officers. And as James Madison explained in the first Congress: “If an unworthy man be continued in office by an unworthy president, the house of representatives can at any time impeach [that officer], and the senate can remove him.”
In practice, it’s rarely been necessary to go that far. “The issue has almost invariably proven moot,” Frank Bowman explains in his comprehensive new volume High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump. Historically, “any appointee whose continued service was so politically toxic as to provoke a serious effort at impeachment has been shuffled off the stage” when the president demands his or her resignation.
A resolution to impeach Bolton, something any member of the House could introduce, might serve as the shot across the bow that convinces Trump it’s time to clean his own house. It needn’t make it to the floor to be effective: merely securing enough cosponsors could be enough. On the other hand, such a move might cause Trump to dig in his heels—with a president this mercurial it’s hard to tell.