Impeachment is the ER. We need to practice preventative medicine.

The only way to prevent future emergencies like the current one is for Congress to seriously limit executive power

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Felix Choo / Alamy Stock Photo, BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

If the impeachment inquiry against President Trump moves to a trial in the Senate, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told reporters this week, his role there must take precedence over his presidential campaign. "We are doing something that is with the gravity of removing the sitting president from office," Booker said. "I will be there. I will be focused. And I will do my work."

Insofar as any member of Congress deserves plaudits for promising to prioritize duly representing his constituents over seeking greater personal power, that's dandy. But Booker's framing of his work as remedying a crisis of presidential misconduct evinces a too-common misconstruction — and one which helped us into this mess in the first place. It makes the legislature's restraint on executive power entirely ex post facto, letting lawmakers skip the more necessary work of trimming the imperial presidency back to its basic administrative roots.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.