Are we on the same page at least that politically appointed federal employees (not including the President) can be fired for any reason at any time, without due process?
They can be fired by their boss (e.g. by the President when applicable) but they can also be subject to impeachment - yes, a cabinet member can be impeached - so not sure how that analogy helps here. These are two different ways to remove someone from a job.
Extending this to the President's job basically means the he can be voted out by his "boss" (the people) or be impeached. Voters don't really engage in any due process, they can vote any way they want for any reason or no reason at all, so that's fine. But the House is not President's boss so they have to follow the constitutionally prescribed impeachment procedure, which to be fair is sufficiently vague for everyone to find something to complain about. But there is at least the "high crimes and misdemeanors" thing.
Found an interesting paper that goes into detail of exactly what we've been debating :
High Crimes Without Law.
Part 1 goes into detail of Johnsons Senate Trial. During the Trial, his lawyer based his entire defense on one of the same arguments that TECSHARE and Spendulus have been making, and it worked:
nullum crimen sine lege “There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor without a law.”
The principle of no crime without law has been described as one of the most “widely held value-judgments in the entire history of human thought.”
Part 2 is Modern Counterarguments to the idea of
nullum crimen sine lege The consensus among law nerds over the past 150 years is pretty clear that when the constitution was written, the founders would
not have considered
nullum crimen sine lege to be a valid defense during the Senate Trial of an impeached official.
One point I hadn't heard or considered before was that 'high crimes' are
crimes naughty actions that only a President (or someone in power) can be held accountable for. If a civilian did the same thing, they wouldn't be in any trouble with the government, because it's not against the law. There is no official extensive list of things a President can be impeached for. There for, the assumption is that it's up to Congress to decide whether it's naughty enough to remove him from office - not whether or not it's a crime.
A high crime is one that can be done only by someone in a unique position of authority, which is political in character, who does things to circumvent justice. The phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors," used together, was a common phrase when the U.S. Constitution was written and did not require any stringent or difficult criteria for determining guilt but meant the opposite. The phrase was historically used to cover a very broad range of crimes.
The charge of high crimes and misdemeanors covers allegations of misconduct by officials. Offenses by officials also include ordinary crimes, but perhaps with different standards of proof and punishment than for non-officials, on the grounds that more is expected of officials by their oaths of office. Indeed the offense may not even be a breach of criminal statute.
Another interesting point is that since the Constitution explicitly states that after being impeached/removed, a President can still be charged criminally for the same thing that got him removed. This contradicts the Double Jeopardy clause, unless being convicted by the Senate isn't the same as being convicted of a crime.
And then you get to the end of the paper and realize none of it even really mattered:
In the end, however, it doesn’t really matter how logical Benjamin Curtis’s argument may have been considering how often it has been ignored in practice. In the century-and-a-half since 1868, six federal judges have been convicted and removed from office for conduct that wasn’t necessarily a crime when they committed it — a clear violation of Curtis’s conclusion.
