Impeachment is a procedure of last resort. It is for when those governed are unable to abide the excesses of one person or more doing the governing. It owes its genesis to England and was a remedy for the Parliament to remove, or have removed, agents of the Crown (the king) whose conduct was egregious and contrary to the public good.

It goes back to the 14th century. The language is the language of the day, peculiarly vague in today’s proceedings. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was one of those phrases that everyone in the context of the day knew what it meant. “Conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman” is another such phrase loaded with meaning but deliberate in its obscurity.

It was not until 1788 that Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish orator, moralist and member of Parliament, really put flesh on the skeleton of impeachment. During the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal and employee of the marauding British East India Company — which had been acting as a government in India before it was annexed by Britain. He was the agent of what was little more than a criminal enterprise.

Hastings claimed that he was given arbitrary power by the East India Company to act in any way he chose. It was this arbitrary power, this concept that he was above the law and above all norms of decency, that inflamed Burke. “We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold, nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will — much less can one person be governed by the will of another,” he said.

Burke stated that there was no entitlement to arbitrary power in any human institution, and it could not be conferred on a governor by anyone because there was no entitlement under heaven for arbitrary power.

It can be argued in today’s crisis it is the exercise of arbitrary power by President Trump that lies behind the U.S. House’s move to impeach. Arbitrary power in diverting funds not approved for that purpose to building a wall on the southern border. Arbitrary power in restricting Congress’s entitlement to investigate the executive branch. On and on the use of what many would call arbitrary power, from abrogating treaties, abandoning allies, trashing traditions, and reversing previous settled issues, like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

All this, Trump asserts, is constitutional under Article 11. In essence, he has said, “Arbitrary power is mine.”

That is what lies behind the urge to impeach Trump. He is claiming to be, in conduct and statement, above the Constitution and the law. Ergo, he should be impeached.

But no. Impeachment, as Burke and his allies found, is a trap unless followed by conviction. In Hastings’ case, impeachment was up to the House of Lords and, despite the pleading of Burke and others, it declined to impeach after the procedure had dragged on for seven years.

Given the pusillanimous nature of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, its seeming preparedness to overlook damage to the constitutional order of governance and all the cascading damage to come down through the years, Trump’s acquittal is to be feared.

Trump in a second term, with the sense that he had been vindicated, would have no regard for law. He would feel emboldened to exercise arbitrary power in the most egregious way, rewarding his business interests and punishing his enemies, real and imagined.

As others have suggested, a better path for Democrats to pursue in the present constitutional crisis might have been to censure Trump, while looking to the courts to restrict him where possible. A less dramatic indictment, but also less of a future danger.

Republicans have developed an interesting defense of their own. Call it “the eye-rolling, tut-tutting.” They do this whenever Trump is raised in conversation, but they will not curb him in the Senate or speak out in public. Political cowardice.

These lily-livered legislators might find courage if they read on in Burke’s pleading in the matter of Hastings: “Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it in the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world.”

There is much more from Burke. It is meaty, relevant stuff.

Photo: Monument to Edmund Burke at the entrance to Trinity College in Dublin

The future may be whirring above your head.

There is a push to commercialize drones that equals any gold rush. Hundreds of drone makers, drone service companies and drone management firms are creating new machines, divining new uses, and planning to increase the penetration of their devices or services in a marketplace that is burgeoning.

Although dominated by DJI, the giant Chinese drone company with seven locations in the United States alone, there are hundreds of drone companies keen to get in on the action.

The drone takeover of the skies is not a thing of science fiction and Popular Mechanics anymore. It is real and it has begun. Soon the skies in cities will be getting as crowded as the highways of Washington and Los Angeles.

In the world of drones, the big struggle now is to increase the payloads. But the real value may be in their ability to collect and process huge amounts of data — an essential part of the “smart cities” of the future. Former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said data is the new oil and drones are the new oil wells.

Drones and autonomous vehicles are destined to be integral to smart cities, with different entrants pursuing different goals. Uber Eats wants dinners for families of four to be wafted aloft by drones. Amazon wants drones that can carry loads of various sizes and shapes. Google wants to own the control technology.

Everyone wants the data.

City managers, police departments, motor vehicle departments and first responders want data. Marketers and homebuilders want data about how we live and travel — and even what we do when we are not between working and getting home.

Smart cities will run on data and drones will be part of the data-acquisition infrastructure. Morgan O’Brien, co-founder of Nextel Communications and now president of Anterix, a company providing secure communications to utilities and others, tells me that data will be the foundation of smart cities.

“A smart city is ‘smart’ in the same way a smartphone is smart. Collecting and processing vast amounts of digital data in virtual real time, a smartphone collects a user to the internet for voice, texting, video and experiences of every sort,” O’Brien said, adding, “The smart city similarly will collect vast amounts of data and virtually simultaneously process that data to make the city safer, more livable, more green and more pleasant.”

This data will be collected from a myriad of sensors, including those on drones: the eyes in the sky.

Carl Berndtson, managing director of Confex Partners Ltd., a Concord, Mass.-based commercial conference organizer, expects 2,500 people at a drone conference which will be held on Oct. 28-30 in Las Vegas. Confex is part of the giant “Drone Week” early in December in Amsterdam, where 3,000 drone entrepreneurs and engineers are expected.

Of course, to keep all those goods-delivering, data-gathering, unmanned vehicles from crashing into each other, a sophisticated micro-air traffic control system will be needed — something far beyond today’s macro system that keeps large aircraft safe. One company, AirMap of Santa Monica, Calif., claims to be well along the way in developing a control system, but there are others and governments will have the essential role.

Drones will come in many sizes and shapes, from drone taxis whipping us about to worker-bee drones, like the ones already employed to inspect electric power lines and hammer nails into shingles on roofs.

In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate, was advised to go into plastics. Today he might be advised to go into drones.

The drone industry has taken off and is headed for where you live and work. Watch your head.

Energy company executives went to bed Sept. 14 with a new existential worry: drone attacks. These are added to the general fear of a cyberattack that could hobble an oil company or bring down the electric grid, or parts of it.

Final details are not in yet, but it is believed that an army of drones hit two Saudi oil processing facilities early on the morning of Sept. 14, causing huge fires.

Heretofore energy companies, especially pipelines and electric utilities, found drones to be a gift. Drones have enabled oil and gas companies to monitor pipelines and electric utilities to monitor their transmission lines.

They are doing the jobs that were done initially by men on horses, then by teams in trucks and jeeps and by line technicians in helicopters. Less expensive, less dangerous and more efficient, drones have been a godsend.

Much of this surveillance is now done by these small electric aircraft, not appreciably different than those the general public can buy in a sophisticated toy store.

The attack on the Saudi oil installations, with its resultant destructive fires, harbors horrors for the future that haven’t been part of the portfolio of future uncertainties faced by companies with large installations or thousands of miles of exposed lines and, in some cases, over-the-ground pipes.

The traditional posture of utilities to this kind of physical threat has been not to try to meet every possibility with a tailor-made defense, but rather to respond quickly.

In fact, rapid response is in the utility DNA — and honed in foul-weather events. If lines come down, the utilities, with military precision, try to get them up again. They stock replacement parts and have a network of crews from neighboring utilities on call. Worst case, they hope, will be a short blackout.

“It’s like a military operation. Think of action stations aboard a ship,” a utility executive says.

But as climate change has increased expectations for extreme weather events, and as the digital society has put new demands on electricity resilience, rapid response is inadequate going forward.

Undergrounding electric lines, previously thought to be prohibitively expensive, is now on the table in the C-suites of some utilities. Worry about drones is another endorsement of that option, where possible. But undergrounding is only a limited defense and it is very expensive and not suitable for major lines carrying vast amounts of power.

Oil and gas companies are more worried about the central facilities than they are about the distribution systems, as far as drone attacks are concerned. Oil refineries have always been vulnerable and now that vulnerability is exposed. While most refineries won’t go up in flames because a small drone with an ignition source hits them, this threat will increase as weaponized private drones grow in power and carrying capacity.

There is a growth industry in protecting vulnerable infrastructure. From secure communications to shields against drone attack, the battle for safety on the home front has been joined.

Drone terrorists have the advantage that drones are cheap, anonymous and the threat is disruption and panic, even if the actual damage is trivial. Off-the-shelf terrorism has arrived.

The public will worry about the security of nuclear plants. Actually, these are probably the safest of large energy facilities from aerial attack. The nuclear vitals are encased in feet of concrete, steel and lead that protects them from bombs and cruise missiles, let alone the new threat coming from those once-fun toys: drones.

The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are acutely aware of the threat from drones and are examining ways to defend against these, sources say. They see a battlefield where the location of the enemy might not be known and where it will be harder to determine whether the perpetrator of an attack is a state player or a terrorist organization.

Complex problems cannot be fixed with simple solutions — unless the problems have become so intricate and intractable that only a simple solution will work.

That may be where we are now with health care.

To some, the simple solution that unties the complicated knot is a single-payer system: Replace the whole complex, expensive and teetering system with something new and simpler.

Yet in the intellectual debate — where ideas are discussed long before they are codified into law — there are powerful forces aligned against real health care overhaul.

These are not just on the right, although conservative thinking is opposed to anything that suggests a larger government or even a community role in health care. Unions, which gain strength when they provide health care, do not want to see that leak away, nor do employees who are happy with the health care provided as part of their employment. Better keep that job.

There is also a phalanx of conservative economists who calculate that universal health care will be too expensive and bankrupt the country. This I find dubious because single-payer health care works. There is evidence. It is not uncharted territory. It works from Australia to Britain, from France to Japan.

In short, the advanced countries of the world all have a single-payer system. It costs them about half of the 18 percent of GDP we spend on health care. You might reasonably think something is wrong when you spend more and get less.

The fact is those who experience tax-paid health care like it. No one who has permanent health care, as in Canada or Britain, is asking for it to be ended. National health systems are fiercely defended by those who have them, bar none.

One organization that is fully committed to a single-payer system — also known as Medicare for All in the political debate — is Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). It is a national group with headquarters in Chicago and 23,000 health care professional members. It is adamant in its advocacy of a single-payer system and takes aim at the health insurance companies as the source of what ails health care in America.

It rejects partial measures, such as beefing up the Affordable Care Act, improving Medicaid and lessening the effect on the poor in various ways. These, PNHP says, avoid the question at the center of the health care debate: What are the insurance companies for? What wound do they bind? The answer, according to PNHP, is none. They just add cost.

Every hospital, whether a for-profit or a community institution, employs huge staffs, sometimes well in excess of 100 people, for negotiating claims with insurance providers. That is a great burden on hospital costs right there, let alone the costs inside the insurance companies.

In decades of dealing with health insurance, which includes looking at it as a reporter, paying for it as an employer, and occasionally, receiving treatment under private insurance, I can tell you that Medicare is now one of the great improvements in my quality of life and peace of mind. I am also one of the few with the temerity to offer an opinion on health care who has received care, and watched members of my family receive it, under the British system.

I am a free-market person, someone who has and still runs his own business, albeit a very modest one, so I am not in love government for government’s sake.

But neither am I in love with state-sanctioned monopolies in insurance. The health insurance companies do not provide health care. They make it more expensive. They do not contribute to wellness. They make it more problematical.

We do not have a health care system. We have a lack of a system: a savage garden full of weeds, where medicine endeavors to grow while the gardeners stand around arguing over money.

PNHP may not have all the answers, but at least it is a pressure group trying to put something on the table, something that serves the rest of the developed world well: single-payer health care.

Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe, who stood head and shoulders above other awful African heads of state, has died aged 95. He may have killed more people and caused more deaths through starvation than even that other icon of evil, Idi Amin of Uganda.

When Mugabe became the republic’s first president in 1980, he was celebrated the world over as the face of the new Africa: a leader who would usher in a time of harmony, heal the wounds of war, and who was keen to assure the white minority he had overthrown that all would be well.

Mugabe spoke of the country that he inherited from Britain and the British settlers as kind of jeweled timepiece. He boasted of its sophisticated agriculture, its functional central bank and its vibrant stock exchange.

Initially, Mugabe’s partnership with the old regime appeared to be sincere. I met two white men who ran his security detail at that time who spoke well of him and said they had detected no bitterness. Early warnings, like his takeover of the newspapers, were ignored. To miscreants, the media is always the problem.

I was born and grew up in Rhodesia, as was my father, first known as Southern Rhodesia. I, like my family, wanted to ignore Mugabe’s downside. The period from the granting of independence to Zimbabwe — with the Lancaster House agreements in London — in 1980 to the mid-1990s was promising.

True, my brother was forced from his farm by squatters whom the police refused evict. But even so, he and his wife were remarkably optimistic, if a little apprehensive, when I visited from my perch in Washington in 1996.

Old friends were keen to believe, as were people around the world, that Mugabe was the new face of enlightened Africa. There were signs that pointed to a troubled future, but the people loved their country were loath to believe the worst.

More people worried about the communism Mugabe and his allies in the local university spouted than what was to become vicious and overt racism directed against not just the white settlers but all people of European descent.

For a few years, Zimbabwe remained what it had been before independence: a peaceful place with racial respect, a thriving commercial sector, and farms that were so productive that they represented the regional breadbasket, feeding Zambia and Malawi as well as exporting to South Africa.

Some trace Mugabe’s descent into dictatorial insanity to the release of Nelson Mandela from detention in South Africa and Mandela’s usurpation of Mugabe as the darling figure in the capitals of the world. There was a sexual overlay as well.

Both Mugabe and Mandela sought the hand of Graca Machel, the widow of Mozambican President Samora Machel, in marriage. Mandela carried off the damsel, and Mugabe’s descent accelerated.

Mugabe seized the primarily white-owned farms, played games with the citizenship of people he didn’t like; rigged elections; used violence against political opponents; and ordered, or condoned, the security forces, in violation court orders, to beat and intimidate anyone who opposed him.

He began to espouse a kind of paranoid racism, where everything that was wrong was because of the colonialism and the evils of the white population. It was always someone else’s fault.

In the end, Mugabe smashed his jeweled-timepiece nation. The currency failed when inflation ran into the millions of percent and today, over two years since Mugabe fell, Zimbabwe still has no currency. Under the new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, it continues to be beset with poverty and famine.

This is the message of Mugabe: Failure to stop the tendencies of those who get away with small constitutional infringements will lead to their getting away with massive wrongdoing.

Part of the dictator’s path is to buttress support by denigrating a particular group, then persecuting that group.

Mugabe started by sending his dreaded Fifth Brigade into the south of the country, where he killed an estimated 25,000 of the Ndebele people who had supported the opposition party and fought colonialism separately under their leader Joshua Nkomo.

Then it was on to seizing white property, white passports, and in the end driving out the commercial class. Hardly a Rhodesian remains in what was Rhodesia.

There are those who shrug at governmental transgression in the belief that the pendulum will swing back. Maybe, but not if it has broken the clock and is on the floor. That is the lesson of Robert Mugabe and the tragedy of the land of my birth.

The political chaos in Britain — and the situation in British politics is chaotic — can be laid at the base of two interventions by direct government usurping representative government.

The first is the intervention of polling. Polling, although useful and indeed invaluable most of the time, does restrict the free operation of representative government. The public state of mind the polling day affects the actions of its elected representatives and can inhibit new ideas as they evolve. In the defense of polls, they are reality check when politicians give way to intoxication with their own thinking. Polls are here to stay; an organic part of the political landscape.

Yet the deliberative process can be inhibited by them. It is no accident that the U.S. Senate is regarded as a great deliberative forum: With six years between elections, there is time to work through a problem — at least there should be.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union because his pollster assured him that the public would support him, as they had voted by a large majority for Britain to remain in the European Economic Community, as it was then known, in 1975. Britain’s membership began in 1973.

A poll is a snapshot and reflects not only the feeling of the populace at the time but also the basis of what it thinks it believes or, in fact, does believe.

Cameron did not allow for campaigning and the emotional appeal of inflamed nationalism, plus some pretty hefty fibs from the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his allies in the Brexit camp.

Had the EU membership issue been left to simmer, as it has simmered for decades, it might eventually have been decided by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament or just simmered on, either to dissipate or develop into an election issue at a later time.

But this has always been a particularly difficult issue for Parliament where the two main parties were split on it. Neither of them, Labor and Conservative, was wholly for Europe or against it. Successive Labor and Conservative governments have stayed firmly in Europe, although complaining all the way — as did Margaret Thatcher during her time as prime minister.

The EU referendum was an intrusion of direct government into the workings of parliamentary representative government — a referendum, not favored in Britain’s unwritten constitution, a sort of legal blithe spirit of practice, precedent, tradition and habit, trailing all the way back to the Magna Carta.

The constitution, long believed to gain its strength from its flexibility, now is flexed to a point of full crisis. Polls gave Cameron overconfidence in looking to a referendum to settle a nettlesome issue. It did, but not in the way Cameron and the polls predicted.

Polls are not going away. Recently I visited Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., home to the influential Quinnipiac Poll, where I conducted a television interview. Conclusion: Those pollsters know what they are doing, and they do it with science and without prejudice. Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, and his staff are employed by the university. The polling arm takes no outside funding, shielding the poll from allegations of political favoritism or manipulation.

It should be recognized by politicians that polls are only a snapshot, a second in time, of evolving public opinion. They do not handle complex issues well and referendums, which are polls taken to extreme, are unreasoning.

It can be argued, and I will not argue against you, that politicians now have abandoned thinking, reasoning and compromising in favor rigidities on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet politicians, in doing their jobs in session, remain a better way of deciding great issues than the whole populace in a committee of the whole.

Britain is in crisis not because it is a democracy, but because it tried something undemocratic and antithetical to its own traditions. The nation that ruled much of the world appears unable to rule itself.

It is coming as surely as cars changed the way we live, as airplanes revolutionized transportation and as the cellphone has conquered all.

It is the smart city of the future.

While it will look much like today’s cities, it will in fact be a digital construct; a place where sensors, interactivity and hyper-electronic speeds replace what will come to be seen as today’s leisurely pace of city operation and communication.

Imagine a place where police cruisers know the location of gunshots before anyone has called 911. Or, as Morgan O’Brien, chief executive officer of Anterix, a creator of private telephone networks for utilities, says, “By using broadband private networks, utilities can know a transmission wire has snapped before it hits the ground.”

Electric utilities, sometimes seen as wedded to the old ways of generation and distribution, have already laid the groundwork for cities’ electronic refurbishment. The first wave of the future, the smart meter, is in more than 60 percent of homes, and deployment continues apace.

The home smart meter does much more than simply record electricity use and ready a bill. It generates data on the local demand and flow patterns in the neighborhood. The smart meter has become vital in helping people save money when electricity prices are low (such as the middle of the night in many jurisdictions), but also helping to integrate the diverse new sources of generation from solar farms, solar panels on rooftops and wind turbines. Keeping tabs on this intermittent generation requires very smart electronics.

“Interconnectivity is the future,” says Clinton Vince, chairman of the U.S. Energy practice and co-chairman of the global energy sector at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. Basically, he points out, electric utilities must be very nimble to deal with the new microgrids and with individual generators using rooftop solar. The same applies to wind turbines, where the flow of electricity can be cut off instantly with a wind drop and other sources have to pick up seamlessly.

Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says all this hyperactivity in the smart city will be recorded and preserved by blockchain, the ledger system of the 21st century.

To come are electric vehicles and autonomous ridesharing — so important that the big tech companies Cisco, Google, Uber and Amazon have invested in smart cities technologies, and have high hopes for growth there.

The smart city will want an even more reliable electric supply than we have today. Rapid response has been the modus operandi of electric companies down through the decades. Outages are handled with speed and big outages, such as after hurricanes, are dealt with by mobilizing restoration crews from unaffected areas.

But that may not be enough with greater reliance on electricity for things like autonomous vehicles and electric-powered delivery drones. These will have self-sufficiency through their batteries, but they also will need to have control systems that can operate in a blackout.

Anterix, for example, will provide secure broadband communications to utilities, enabling them to communicate when all other systems have failed.

There are two existential threats to the electric grid and, therefore, to the electricity-hungry smart city. One is cyberattack by enemies known and unknown. The other is a magnetic pulse, generated by an act of God in the form of solar flares, or an act of evil in the form of a nuclear weapon detonated overhead. Either way, the grid must be hardened, as far as science allows, against such eventualities.

I would submit that this amounts to a brave new world. But I would implore the designers to remember people also want simple things of their cities, like walkability and mobility.

If you get walkability you get livability and, yes, lovability. Think Paris, San Antonio and San Francisco. Get smart, smart city designers.

Photo: A JUMP on-demand electric bike in downtown San Antonio. JUMP Bikes is a dockless electric bicycle sharing system acquired by Uber – San Antonio, Texas, USA

Labor Day is almost here and with it another blessed, three-day weekend. Three days without work!

The best day, of course, is the middle one, when we can luxuriate in the time off without the knowledge that grips most of us on Sunday afternoons — that we must climb Monday’s escarpment.

The fact is that we Americans work too much. Not necessarily too hard, but too much. In the United States, workers’ vacations are mostly two precious weeks — and a third after long service. In Europe, they’re a month or, as in Germany, often up to six weeks — yet no one accuses the Germans of being idlers or not performing.

We won’t get more vacations, I think, until high-tech workers — those one might refer to as “the indispensables” — demand and get them. Some already have the choice of working in Europe and are looking at the “package” of their employment, not just the dollars in the paycheck. If they demand more, the idea will get around.

However, more vacation days won’t have the same benefit as those leisurely Sundays in a three-day weekend.

There is a way to greater leisure with the same number of work hours in a week. I have experienced it, and it does wonders in terms of employee happiness and creativity.

In the early 1960s, I was a writer for BBC Television News, and we worked a fabulous shift system: three days on and three days off. This system recognized that journalists could seldom finish what they had started in a procrustean eight hours.

The BBC 10-hour shift — three days on and three days off — accepted and accommodated the reality of the work rather than trying to squeeze the work into an arbitrary time frame, leaving it either unfinished or for someone else to try to finish — say a script for the late news broadcast or coverage of an ongoing parliamentary debate.

The social dimension of this work structure was even more interesting. Writers and editors became more productive in other ways: Some wrote novels, others worked on biographies or tried their hands at plays. They’d been given the gift of time.

Armed with this experience, when I worked at the Washington Post, where I was an assistant editor and also president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, one of the largest chapters of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union that represented journalists and some other workers, I was appalled at the mess the Post had with its overtime.

There was a complicated system of overtime and something called “overtime cutoff,” which applied to people who were paid more than the Guild-negotiated salary. It led to fights, conscientious reporters and editors working overtime without compensation, and major altercations over weekend schedules. No winners, just unhappy people. The management knew it was a mess and would’ve liked to change it.

When I suggested the BBC system to the Washington Post Company, management was enthusiastic. They asked if the union would bring it forward as a formal proposal in the contract negotiations, then just beginning for a new three-year contract.

We had to have our proposal vetted by union headquarters, the International. They said, “No, no, no. Heresy.” The union had always fought for a shorter workday since the so-called “model contract,” written by Heywood Broun, the famous reporter, columnist and founder of the American Newspaper Guild, in 1935. It was dropped like a libelous story.

Well, the three-days shift won’t work in many places, but in journalism, manufacturing and retail, it’s worth a try. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers would have the joy of that middle day of rest and, maybe, creativity.

When you open another cold one on Sept. 1, think about how nice it would be if that happened all year. Three days on and three days off. Glorious!