KEISLING: Impeachment hearings for AG Kane give new meaning to meaninglessness

The Subcommittee on Courts’ hearing to consider impeaching AG Kane wasn’t just a colossal waste of time. It was a measure of the disconnect of the legislature from the state’s real problems.

by Bill Keisling

By far the most interesting and telling public hearing in Harrisburg this week concerned the state’s House’s Subcommittee on Courts inquiry into the possible impeachment of Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Kane has announced she will not seek reelection and that she will leave office at the end of her term next January. There’s simply not enough time to impeach her, committee members and witnesses pointed out at the hearing. And she’s leaving office anyway, so what’s the point?

There are of course many more important things that our elected state officials could hold hearings about.

Last year’s state budget is now eight months overdue. There is little or no hope in passing this year’s budget, and an unknown number of state-supported agencies and schools may be about to go belly up, unable to pay their bills.

A large ring of Supreme Court justices, prosecutors, cops, lawyers and other officials stand accused of trading pornography over the course of years. Then there are the older, even more terrible scandals that everyone in Harrisburg has been ignoring for years: The Sandusky / Penn State / Second Mile pedophile scandal. The Luzerne County Kids for Cash scandal. And on and on. There have been no hearings about any of those things.

So this week’s hearing on impeaching a public official who can’t be impeached really went a long way to explain just how broken Harrisburg is these days.

It wasn’t just a hearing: it was a statement of just how inane, disconnected from reality, and corrupted by inaction, diversion and cover-up Pennsylvania government has become.

Subcommittee members did mention in passing that AG Kane faces criminal charges for “leaking grand jury material” to the Philadelphia Daily News. But there was of course no mention that others leaked Kane’s grand jury presentment itself, and related material, to the same newspaper company. But mentioning that would only point out the broader hypocrisy and dishonesty at play here, and we can’t have that.

Now that the Pennsylvania Senate has voted not to remove Attorney General Kathleen Kane from office by Direct Address, state officials like the legislators on the Subcommittee on Courts have said they will explore removing lame duck Kane from office using the two remaining methods prescribed by the state constitution: legislative impeachment; or upon her conviction of a crime.

But like the Senate’s failed Direct Address attempt, neither of these other two methods is at all practical.

That’s partly because of the vague wording in the state constitution.

It’s also partly because, over the years, these two methods of removing Pennsylvania office holders — impeachment, and “on conviction” — have been so misused, abused and disabused by both political parties in the legislature that few can agree on their meaning and use.

The state constitution reads:

Article VI Section 7, Removal of Civil Officers: “All civil officers shall hold their offices on the condition that they behave themselves well while in office, and shall be removed on conviction of misbehavior in office or of any infamous crime.”

And Article VI Section 6, Officers Liable to Impeachment: “The Governor and all other civil officers shall be liable to impeachment for any misbehavior in office, but judgment in such cases shall not extend further than to removal from office and disqualification to hold any office of trust or profit under this Commonwealth. The person accused, whether convicted or acquitted, shall nevertheless be liable to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment according to law.”

“On conviction,” or is that “after all appeals are exhausted”?

As for the first method, removal of state officials “on conviction”:

You might imagine that that’s fairly cut and dried. But it’s not, thanks largely to the Republican Party that today controls both houses of the legislature.

In 1999, House Republican leaders refused to expel GOP state Rep. Frank Serafini, who’d been convicted in federal court on a perjury charge for lying about a scheme to funnel $129,000 in illegal campaign contributions to other Republicans.

“You’re not really convicted until your appeals have been exhausted,” Republican House Speaker Matt Ryan said at the time. Hoping to keep a slim 103-to-100 majority in the House, Republican leaders for months protected Rep. Serafini from expulsion while he appealed his conviction. Ryan and his GOP leadership even hired lawyers to go to court to say that the House makes and follows its own rules.

It’s worth pointing out that this week’s hearing on impeaching AG Kane was held, fittingly, in the Ryan Office Building, named for the Speaker Ryan, defender of Rep. Serafini.

As for impeachment, the record isn’t too good on that score either.

At this week’s hearing on impeaching AG Kane, subcommittee member Rep. Tim Briggs (D-Montgomery County) even wondered aloud, “How many impeachments have gone all the way?”

In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston Book Company, 1895), Roger Foster lists impeachments in Pennsylvania as follows:

1780 – Francis Hopkinson, state judge of admiralty, impeached for bribery, charges dismissed for lack of evidence.

1793 – John Nicholson, comptroller-general, impeached for corruption, resigned before he could be removed.

1802 – Alexander Addison, president judge, “a Presbyterian preacher, who had abandoned the pulpit for the bench, and was accustomed in his charges to grand juries to take every opportunity to denounce the Democrats and all who sympathized with the French Revolution,” impeached, convicted and removed from office.

1805 – during the period of Jeffersonian attacks on the Whig courts following Marbury v. Madison, and “emboldened by their success, the Democratic party then attacked the whole Supreme Court of the state, with the exception of Judge Brackenridge, who was a Democrat,” respondents were acquitted at legislative trial.

1816 – Walter Franklin, Jacob Hibshman and Thomas Clark, judges of Lancaster County Common Pleas Court, impeached and tried in the Senate on charges they had “improperly refused to compel attorneys to pay to the clients moneys which they had collected and unjustly retained,” all acquitted.

1825 – the same Judge Walter Franklin, of Lancaster, was again impeached on the charge of “delay of administration of justice,” again acquitted.

Also in 1825 – Robert Porter, president judge of the third judicial district, charged with sundry chicanery, acquitted.

1826 – Seth Chapman, president judge of eighth judicial district, charged with “illegal arrest” and chicanery, acquitted.

1832 – John Young, judge of the tenth judicial district, charged with “incompetency, by reason of old age and intemperance,” acquitted for lack of evidence.

After these cases, the only impeachment in the twentieth century was that of state Supreme Court Justice Rolf Larsen, who was impeached and removed from office in 1994.

The witnesses at this week’s Subcommittee on the Courts inquiry into AG Kane’s circumstances included two of the managers from Larsen’s 1990s impeachment, Democrat Frank Dermody of Allegheny County, and Republican Jeff Piccola, Republican from Dauphin County.

Both reminded the subcommittee members that Larsen’s impeachment was a long, drawn-out, “tedious and expensive” procedure, “as it should be,” both said.

Former state representative and senator Piccola, who himself left office under scandal, suggested possible reasons why there had only been one impeachment in the twentieth century.

Piccola posited that the state’s court system had gotten better and more “refined,” and that constitutional changes in 1968 that created the Court of Judicial Discipline meant that the court now policed itself.

Of course, just the opposite is true: as we see in the case of Justice Michael Eakin, the Court of Judicial Discipline is there to cover up corruption and malfeasance in the courts, not to expose and prosecute it.

Justice Larsen’s impeachment tells the tale, and explains the problem legislators faced in impeaching Kane.

Justice Larsen was charged with sundry chicanery, politicking from the bench, and telling takes out of school. But, in the end, Larsen was criminally charged with fraudulently attaining prescription medicine for depression.

Larsen was criminally charged with crimes on October 28, 1993. The House began impeachment proceedings against him shortly thereafter.

Larsen was found guilty of two counts of criminally conspiracy on April 9, 1994, and sentenced to a year of probation and removed from office by the trial judge on June 13, 1994.

But Larsen still refused to resign. The Senate finally threw him out of office after a month-long trial on October 4, 1994.

So it took almost a year to impeach and remove Rolf Larsen by impeachment.

Alas, subcommittee members were reminded, since AG Kane won’t go to trial until August, and she leaves office at the end of the year, there’s not enough time to impeach her.

After his comments to the subcommittee, Rep. Dermody wandered out into the hall of the Ryan Office Building and told a deflated group of capitol reporters that it looked like there would be no time to impeach AG Kane, and little purpose.

“The fact that she’s not running for reelection takes a lot of wind out of the sails,” Dermody sighed to the crestfallen reporters.

Elsewhere in the opulent Pennsylvania capitol building the political parties were holding equally ridiculous and unfruitful hearings on matters related to this year’s budget, and last year’s budget, which legislators also have no intention of doing anything about.

The state constitution, it should be pointed out, has another, much quicker, and more delightful remedy for removing them all from public office.

They could all be voted out by the voters of Pennsylvania.

 

Bill Keisling is the author of  “We All Fall Down: A chronicle of an impeachment foretold, concerning the impeachment of Rolf Larsen.”