LETTERS: IMPEACHMENT METHOD NEEDS CHANGE

To the editor:

The notion of the Senate theoretically being able to remove a president leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The president is unique among federal officials who are liable to impeachment in that his being in office in the first place is due to his having been selected by the widest possible manifestation of public opinion: the universal ballot, even distorted as this manifestation is -- on purpose, I believe -- by the Electoral College. All Cabinet officials and all federal judges, though initially selected by the president, must have their appointments consented to by the Senate. So it is appropriate, when one of these officials screws up royally, that the Senate, with the assistance of the House, has the job of rectifying the error.

The question of whether or not to remove the president should be answered by the entity that put him where he is: that is, the body politic. I have no quarrel with the present procedure, which has a slight chance of unseating the president anyway, except that the body politic, not the Senate, should have the final say by plebiscite in the matter. To sum up, leave the impeachment process the way it is, except that in the case of the impeachment of a president, the impeachment will be tried not by the Senate, but by plebiscite, either ad hoc or else in combination with midterm elections. The fact that in the case of a president the Senate would be presided over by the chief justice in no way mitigates the unfairness.

Further, on the subject of elections and the Constitution, there are a couple of other changes I would like to see as well in the interest of maximizing electoral choice. Get rid of the requirement that the president be born a citizen of the United States, and get rid of the age requirements for being president, senator or representative. If the constituency of one of these wants to elect Donald Duck, why should an arbitrary constitutional standard say them nay?

While we are about it, let's dispense with the Electoral College, whose main purpose seems to be occasionally to thwart the will of the electorate. When I vote for the office of president, I do not perceive myself as voting for a handful of Illinois politicos who will meet at Washington the following December to elect the president. No, I am doing my damndest to see that a particular person becomes president. There have been a couple of instances in which a candidate who got a majority of the popular vote went on to lose in the Electoral College. Also, in an election three decades ago, an elector from a state that Nixon won cast his ballot for the Libertarian Party candidate. Why does the will of the people have to be filtered through this extra layer of politicians anyway?

Finally, if experience is any guide, I just know some genius among the readership of the Southeast Missourian will phone or write to say that what I have just written has no validity, because it calls into question a state of affairs of longstanding or because I am a liberal or for any reason at all -- any, that is, except one that honestly addresses my argument. I sometimes dream about meeting such people and answering them with the a response well-suited to their mental gifts: "Yo, Mama!"

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.