Calumniating Insinuations and Facts

"The people have a right to petition, but not to use that right to cover calumniating insinuations." — Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1808.

For the past eight years, a frequently heard declaration in American polite, and not so polite, conversation has been a variation on, "The President [more frequently, 'That lying bastard'] is destroying the Constitution". Often, such a remark is received unchallenged, as if it were an established fact. It is not.

What does the quoted insinuation mean in the context of American Constitutional Law? It means literally that the American President continues to perpetrate Unconstitutional acts. What constitutes an Unconstitutional act? It is, as it is Constitutionally defined, whatever the United States Supreme Court deems to be so, by at least a simple majority of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. When is the President guilty of Unconstitutional acts? If, and only if, he is first impeached by the United States House of Representatives on such charges, and subsequently tried and convicted by the United States Senate, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. This hasn't happened during our current President's term of office. In fact, it has never happened in American history. Though President Andrew Johnson, President Lincoln's successor, was impeached by the House, he was subsequently acquitted by the Senate.

The oft repeated allegation about our President is patently false. It is also, in my humble opinion, slanderous and deliberately so. And in the opinion of a higher authority, Thomas Jefferson, the people don't have that right.