Stop the Impeachment-Polling Madness

In a representative democracy, the will of the people always counts. Though elected officials are not obliged to vote in accordance with the will of their constituents, they are obliged to elicit and understand the opinions and circumstances of those whose best interest they serve. 



As for whether that necessitates incessant public-opinion polls on the president’s impeachment and removal—that's a stretch.

In his now-classic impeachment handbook, published just months before President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, the late legal scholar Charles Black decried opinion polls on presidential guilt or innocence prior to the Senate vote as an “unspeakable indecency.” The technology of the time served as the starting point of Black’s anxiety: He worried that “continual nationwide television exposure” would create “public pressure for some given result.” In