When America’s founding fathers were debating how to set up a brand-new government, they
ran into a problem: What should happen if a president, in Benjamin
Franklin’s words, has “rendered himself obnoxious?”
Most countries didn’t have elected leaders.
Or ways to get rid of them, if necessary.
So Franklin and the framers turned to a provision of British common law known as impeachment:
Trial, conviction, punishment.
In Great Britain, impeachment could be brought against anybody, any citizen.
And it also could result in any punishment, including death.
Michael Gerhardt is a constitutional law professor who literally wrote the book in impeachment.
So they put impeachment in the constitution and then set up a whole series of unique american
features in it.
The constitution lays out three offenses for which any federal official, including the
President, can be impeached.
The first two, treason and bribery, are pretty straightforward.
Treason means helping enemies of the United States.
Bribery, taking money or gifts in exchange for a political favor.
And the last phrase, other high crimes and misdemeanors, is not defined in the constitution
But these were thought to be serious offenses against the Republic, and serious breaches
of trust.
For three U.S. presidents, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the question
of whether to impeach and remove them from office centered around whether their behavior
fit in this third category of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The process of Impeachment has to start in the House of Representatives.
Any member can introduce an impeachment resolution.
A resolution, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors
But plenty, like this one, go nowhere.
That’s because impeachment charges, have to be approved by a majority of the House
Judiciary Committee.
Next, the full House of Representatives votes on whether to impeach.
If a simple majority votes yes, the President is officially impeached.
But that doesn’t mean they lose the presidency.
That decision happens in a Senate trial.
The Senators act as the jury.
They hear evidence from both sides And if 67% of those Senators vote to to convict,
the President is removed from office.
This has never actually happened.
In 1863, a House majority voted to impeach Andrew Johnson for firing is Secretary of
War.
This was after months of conflict after Reconstruction following the civil war.
The only other president impeached by the House was Bill Clinton in 1998.
But in both cases, not enough Senators voted to actually remove them from office.
Johnson was only one vote short, but in Clinton’s case, it wasn’t even close
The Respondent, William Jefferson Clinton, is not guilty as charged in the Senate article
of impeachment.
That’s because votes in Clinton’s impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate were
split almost completely by party.
part of the disagreement within the Senate had to do with the context in which Clinton's
actions had taken place.
The whole thing started when Clinton was sued for sexual harassment by a woman named Paula
Jones, who worked for him when he was Governor of Arkansas.
In a deposition for that case, Jones’ lawyers asked Clinton if he’d had a sexual relationship
with a different employee-- a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton said he hadn’t.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Ms. Lewinsky.
But that wasn’t true.
I had intimate contact with her that was inappropriate.
The house will be in order.
Republicans in the house argued Clinton should be impeached for lying under oath.
What the defenders want to do is lower the standards by which we judge this president,
and lower the standards for our society by doing so.
Democrats disagreed that the offense was serious enough to be called a “high crime.”
At one point, they walked out of the chamber in protest.
There is one small segment on the far-right, who have lost all objectivity, and are determined
to impeach the President at all costs.
House Resolution 6, 11, resolved, that William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United
States, is impeached, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
But Clinton’s popularity didn’t really suffer.
There was not a sense the American people are demanding that he be tossed out of office.
Not a single Democratic Senator voted to remove Clinton from office.
Typically, you need to have members of more than one party
That’s one of the major differences between Clinton’s case and President Richard Nixon’s.
Over the course of several months in 1973, members of Congress, and the American people,
learned about Nixon’s possible involvement in a break-in at the offices of the Democratic
National Committee.
By the time the charges had been shown to have some evidence supporting them, the public
began to kind of render a judgement against Nixon, which was, his popularity plummeted.
That evidence came out because Republicans, members of Nixon’s own party, in both the
House and Senate, called for investigations into the President’s behavior.
In the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans joined with Democrats to approve Articles
of Impeachment against Nixon.
But Nixon resigned before the full house could vote on impeachment because Republican leaders
had told him there was no way he’d survive.
Which explains why no president has ever been removed from office by impeachment.
For that to happen, the president doesn’t just have to commit some high crime or misdemeanor.
He has to lose his own party.
In which case, history suggests he’ll see himself out.