Culture

“Arrogate” and Other Pesky Impeachment Words


I am often baffled by Latinate words. For instance, “attenuate”: Is that to make something shorter or to drag something out? Let’s look it up (hauling out the analog dictionary): “attention span,” “attentive,” “attenuate”—“to make thin in consistency; to make thin or slender; to lessen the amount, force, magnitude, or value of; to reduce the severity, virulence, or vitality of.” There is a Latinate word in the articles of impeachment filed by the House of Representatives on December 10th that I had to look up: “arrogate.” It’s in Article II: Obstruction of Congress: the President “sought to arrogate to himself the right to determine the propriety, scope, and nature of an impeachment inquiry into his own conduct, as well as the unilateral prerogative to deny any and all information to the House of Representatives in the exercise of its ‘sole Power of Impeachment.’ ”

According to Merriam-Webster, “arrogate,” since 1537, has meant “to claim or seize without justification.” The Times, in its annotated version of the impeachment articles, wrote that the phrase “sought to arrogate to himself the right” speaks to the “separation of powers.” It is the House’s right to investigate and impeach the President for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” as stated in the Constitution, and the President does not have the right to impede the congressional investigation by refusing to turn over records or ordering his staff to defy subpoenas. “Subpoena,” another Latinate word, means, literally, “under penalty.” In common usage, a subpoena is “a writ commanding a person designated in it to appear in court under a penalty for failure.” It remains to be seen what the penalty, in this case, will be.

The sense of “arrogate” is probably more familiar in the related word “arrogant,” which describes the behavior of people who think they know better, who are above it all, who believe that ordinary standards don’t apply to them. Leona Helmsley was being arrogant when she famously said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” You remember Leona Helmsley, don’t you? She was the luxury-hotel owner who styled herself “the Queen” and who ended up not in the White House but in the Big House.

The hearings leading to the articles of impeachment introduced a few proper nouns that cannot be found in the dictionary. I had to Google A$AP Rocky, for instance, a rapper who was jailed last summer in Sweden after a street brawl and is involved only to the extent that his name (which could be shorthand for “give us the money as soon as possible”) suddenly reminded Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (and also a hotel owner), of a phone conversation he had with the President last summer. Also new to me was something that sounded like “barisma”—a cross between “barista” and “charisma”? Sadly, no. Burisma is only a Ukrainian gas company invoked in a warmed-over corruption scandal, not a nitro cold brew served with flair.

One term that did not need defining but was subjected to it anyway was “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Paul Taylor, a Republican counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, surprised the nation’s lexicographers by citing not Noah Webster, our homegrown maker of dictionaries, but Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and may have been consulted by the Framers. In his 1785 edition, Taylor said, Johnson defined “high” as “capital; great; opposed to little; as, high treason.” A “misdemeanor,” according to Dr. Johnson, was “something less than an atrocious crime.” “Atrocious,” Taylor went on, in the spirit of completism, was “wicked in a high degree; enormous; horribly criminal.” He then abridged the term, skipping over the “crimes” (although Merriam-Webster makes the point that “crimes and misdemeanors” has been a redundant “fixed phrase” since the fourteenth century and was standard legal language by the time of the American Revolution), and defined a “high misdemeanor” as something “just less than a crime that is wicked in a high degree.”

Wherefore, the President’s “Do us a favor, though” is not bribery but simply bad behavior, and the Constitution is attenuated right before our eyes.



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