The Founders were idealists but also realists, and they recognized that people’s private ambitions and thirst for power or money were powerful motivators. They understood that the human condition was flawed, and that goodness of human nature could not be relied upon. So, they set up a system of checks and balances of power in the three branches of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, and in a federal system of divided power between states and the federal government. They understood it was necessary to create these competing and redundant structures to guard against abuse of power and corruption. But they went even further.
The Constitution created two other safeguards against corruption in the impeachment powers of Article II, Section 4 and in the emoluments clause in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution. The latter prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title from any foreign state without congressional consent. With these safeguards, the Founders believed they had created a governmental system better than any prior to forestall domestic public vice and the corruption that would come from foreign influence. Still, Washington’s Farewell Address of 1797 framed the issue in ways that are as relevant today as they were 227 years ago, when he wrote:
The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave… to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury… So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
The standard for impeachment as expressed in the Constitution is conviction of Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.