Subject: Re: "We need a 4th branch of Gov't"
I don't think that's entirely accurate. The main "checks" on the executive are political and structural. They have to stand for election, and a great deal of the power of government isn't directly in their hands. Impeachment isn't there to prevent maladministration or overstepping the boundaries of the other branches - it's there in case the President commits an actual "high crime or misdemeanor." If the President is doing a terrible job of being President - doing atrocious and awful things that aren't unambiguously "high crimes" - the remedy is to vote him out at the end of his term.

Actually, this is not entirely accurate. You mention “high crime or misdemeanor”, but then slide to things that are “high crimes”. The actual word you jump past is “misdemeanor”, which in colonial America (ie: to the people writing the Constitution) involved any sort of behavior or “lesser wrong” including public brawling, a breach of public trust, or (for example, at the time) speaking against the King.

A “misdemeanor” could include anything and everything from property damage to public disturbance, public drunkenness or even blasphemy. Now if you want to say that “high” modifies both “crimes” and misdemeanors, well there are “high misdemeanors” of the time, which included abuse of the public trust, corruption, or subversion of government in any of many forms.

But back to the idea that “they have to stand for election” and therefore “impeachment” isn’t a “check”, the idea of impeachment exists precisely to remove an elected official within their term - and the reason it isn’t used more often is that the Founding Fathers did not foresee the “team” aspect of politics; the concept of “political parties” was something they entirely missed. So as we have seen, even members of a party who find the occupant odious have a strong incentive not to vote in favor of impeachment, because that signals “not on the team”, which will come to haunt them at their own election time, not to mention in any other political dealings they may have up until that time (committee assignments, funding, even where their office is located).

I am quite sure impeachment would be rarely - but more often used than it is (total impeachments: 4, total convictions: 0) if the votes were secret, which would largely eliminate the accountability of the “team player” aspect of it all. And perhaps that would be a good thing, although I would like to see the votes recorded for posterity and made public at some future date (10 years? 25 years?) later.

Anyway, “impeachment” is a 100% political - and 0% legal - process. It is whatever the organizing bodies say it is, and the “cries and misdemeanors” need not be written nor codified in some law somewhere (although it would be better if they were, obviously). Impeachment IS a “check”. Not a very good one, obviously, but a little better than not having one at all.