Frederick Hess writes for the current print issue of NR about the awful tenure of Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. He calls him “the worst secretary in the 45-year history of the U.S. Department of Education, and it’s not particularly close.”

Cardona’s awfulness is not only due to policy errors, though there are plenty of those. It is also due to violating the Constitution and abusing his office in violation of the public trust. These are impeachable offenses, and I urged the new Republican majority in the House in 2022 to begin impeachment proceedings against Cardona. I reiterated that call three more times.

Had the House asserted its constitutional prerogative to impeach Cardona, it would have drawn more attention to his flagrant abuses and made his life miserable as House committees rifled through the department’s inner workings. In principle, he still deserves impeachment; but this Congress is almost over, and his time in office might be up regardless, given the presidential election. If Cardona stays on in a Harris administration, the case for impeachment would be just as strong as it is now.

Aside from the impeachment provisions, there’s another part of the Constitution that is supposed to protect Americans from awful secretaries of education: the Tenth Amendment, which says all powers not given to the federal government — such as education — belong to the states. The best outcome would be to make the worst secretary the last secretary by abolishing the Department of Education.