By Reid K. Beveridge
President Joe Biden has good reason to be wary of his allies’ impeachment of President Donald Trump — political reasons.
There was exactly one impeachment of a president in the first 209 years after the Constitution took effect, creating our democratic republic. Now, there have been three in the past 22, two of those in just the past year. This does not include the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974, an action that was certain had Nixon not resigned first.
But other than Nixon’s resignation in the face of near-certain conviction and removal, none of these impeachments resulted in removal of a president. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1869 fell one vote short of the two-thirds required in the Senate.
Impeachment is a political act, not a criminal one. Even Andrew Johnson committed no criminal act, though he surely was guilty of disobeying a duly enacted federal law, the Tenure in Office Act. Many constitutional scholars today agree that this law was unconstitutional. Enacted shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, it prohibited the president from firing any federal official who had been confirmed by the Senate without Congress’ permission. The Radical Republicans who at the time had majorities in Congress hated Johnson, a Southern Democrat Lincoln had put on the 1864 ticket for political reasons. Johnson had fired the secretary of war.
Agree or disagree with the Tenure in Office Act, a president’s defiance of a duly enacted law is not a trivial matter. Neither was President Nixon’s conduct during the Watergate situation trivial. Nixon clearly knew of the burglary that was the underlying crime and covered it up. That’s called obstruction of justice, among other things.
Nor, at its core, was Bill Clinton’s conduct trivial. Clinton’s defenders will argue that the special prosecutor’s probing into Clinton’s sex life was trivial. Perhaps. What was not trivial was Clinton lying to the federal grand jury. But it was not convincing to even a simple majority in the Senate, even some Republicans. Turned out, it was convincing to a federal judge, and she disbarred him for five years.
In retrospect, also called twenty-twenty hindsight, many believe the impeachment against Clinton was a mistake by the 1998 Republicans. Bill Clinton left office two years later very popular.
Which brings us to Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. Many Americans of the liberal or progressive persuasion have never accepted the fact that Trump actually won the 2016 presidential election. Clearly his opponent, Hillary Clinton, never has. She still believes it was stolen. So do many Democrats, who continue to insist Trump only won with Russian collusion.
You may like or dislike Trump’s telephone call with the president of Ukraine. You may think it wise or unwise. But was it treason? Or bribery? Or a high crime or misdemeanor? Any president of the United States is in charge of the nation’s foreign policy, so any president can call a foreign counterpart and say anything he wishes. It may be unwise, but it is not a crime.
Now, we have a president impeached for making a speech to his supporters, urging them to march on the Capitol and lobby their representatives. Unwise? Perhaps. But no constitutional scholar I have heard in the past week or two thinks Trump’s speech is anything close to inciting the riot that ensued.
Trump has now left office, and if and when the Senate trial will occur is unclear.
But what we have here, no matter what happens, is dangerous to the republic. That is because we have trivialized impeachment. Two impeachments in a year? Two impeachments on this body of evidence?
President Biden should be very wary of all this. Because if this sort of impeachment practice is allowed to stand, he is in danger of being impeached himself in 2023, if the Republicans regain a majority in the House of Representatives.
Two cliches apply: What goes around, comes around. And be careful what you ask for. You just may get it.
Reid K. Beveridge has covered politics in Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Delaware and Washington, D.C. He now resides in Milton.
