Kobach in 1998: Constitution enables impeachment of president for ‘bad conduct’

Two decades before President Donald Trump endorsed him for Kansas governor, Kris Kobach contemplated what grounds could be used to remove a president from power.

The Kansas Republican concluded that the constitutional standard for impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors” did not refer exclusively to illegal acts committed by the president or other public officials.

“Rather, the framers’ understanding of misdemeanor can be found in the word’s Latin origins – ‘bad demeanor’ or ‘bad conduct,’ ” Kobach argued in 1998 when President Bill Clinton was engulfed in scandal for lying about an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Kobach, now the Kansas secretary of state, was serving as a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City at the time and The Kansas City Star published his thoughts in its opinion pages.

“The framers would have regarded President Clinton’s misconduct as impeachable,” Kobach said of the Clinton scandal. “Given their focus on maintaining public trust, the framers clearly would have considered lying under oath impeachable. However, I believe that they would have been even more disturbed by Clinton’s efforts to mislead the public. Looking into a TV camera and lying point blank to every American is a flagrant abuse of trust.”

Kobach said in a statement that he stands by his analysis from 1998, but he also drew a distinction between Clinton’s conduct and allegations against Trump.

Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen admitted Tuesday in a federal plea deal that he violated campaign finance law “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” by making payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election in exchange for their silence about affairs.

In the days since its filing, Trump has repeatedly attacked Cohen and the Department of Justice. The White House has maintained that Trump has committed no wrongdoing despite the implications in Cohen’s plea deal.

Kobach, who credits Trump’s endorsement with helping him win the GOP primary, said in a statement that Trump’s alleged actions would not meet the standard for impeachment.

“A crucial distinction is the time of the act. Impeachment is a remedy for the abuse of power or breach of trust by a sitting president. So even if the alleged actions rose to the level of high misdemeanor (which they don’t), they occurred prior to his taking office,” Kobach said.

The commentary on impeachment was one of several pieces by Kobach that appeared in The Star before he rose to political prominence.

Between his time as a law student in 1993 and his failed congressional bid in 2004, at least a dozen of Kobach’s pieces appeared in The Star, an outlet he often derides on the campaign trail now as “The Kansas City Red Star.”

The old articles offer insight into the future GOP nominee’s politics and his personality. His guest commentaries covered a range of topics from the limits of federal power to Kobach’s frustration with poor grammar.

All of them are marked by the same intensity Kobach has displayed in the courtroom and on the campaign trail.

In a 1997 piece, Kobach warned about a “disturbing new current” in American speech: the use of nouns as verbs. He rattled off examples of nouns that had been wrongly used as verbs: dialogue, office, impact, interface and collision.

“This trendy new talk is troubling because it violates one of the most fundamental rules of grammar: Only nouns can perform noun functions, only verbs can do what verbs do, and so on. Disregarding this law of grammar is like pretending that the law of gravity no longer applies to you,” Kobach wrote.

He compared the “verb-abominations” to alien invaders and jokingly suggested that the solution to this crisis would be to make it “a misdemeanor to misuse these words and then use the collected fines to improve basic English instruction in public schools.”

After he was elected to the Overland Park City Council, Kobach published a piece that chastised state legislators on both sides of the state line for sloppy lawmaking, a problem he saw tied to a decline in the number of attorneys in the statehouses.

“But the fact remains that the frenetic final stretch of the legislative season will always engender sloppy lawmaking. Now is the time for the few lawyers left in the statehouses to step forward and put their training to work. If they fail, the consequences will remain with us long after the race is run,” Kobach wrote in 1999.

And while he was still a law student at Yale University in 1993, Kobach published a commentary about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He argued that statements in support of Ginsburg’s confirmation on the basis of her status “as a champion of the women’s rights movement” helped reinforce “an insidious and growing misconception in America today, that the Supreme Court justices are merely politicians with robes, hacks who bring a political agenda with them to the court and lobby their fellow justices accordingly.”

Kobach, who as a candidate for governor has repeatedly criticized the Kansas Supreme Court’s role in school finance, argued in the 25-year-old piece that this politicized approach to judicial appointments resulted in a system where nine unelected judges ruled the nation.

He also argued that “the gender, race and religion of a Supreme Court justice are largely irrelevant. The Supreme Court has no business representing anyone. The justices are there to apply the Constitution objectively, not to shape it according to the demands of various social groups.”

This story was originally published August 24, 2018 at 12:03 PM.