Beveridge: Impeachment should be rare and backed by abundant evidence
Reid K. Beveridge has covered politics in four states and Washington, D.C., since 1964. He also is a retired Army and Army National Guard brigadier general. He resides near Georgetown.
There are four ways a president of the United States may be removed from office.
Two are death and resignation. There has been one resignation: Richard M. Nixon in 1974. The most recent death was John F. Kennedy in 1963. By far, the most common is completion of one or two terms, after four or eight years.
Then, there is impeachment. No president has been removed from office this way.
The Founding Fathers put impeachment in the Constitution to make it possible, but very difficult, to remove a corrupt president. Thus, the grounds for removal are few and difficult: treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors. It is left to Congress to define “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Three presidents have been impeached but not removed. Impeachment requires only a majority of the House of Representatives, not terribly difficult to achieve. However, removal requires a supermajority of two-thirds in the Senate. In other words, the Founding Fathers wanted impeachment to be rare.
Today, we are on the cusp of a fourth impeachment in 25 years — fifth if you count both of Donald Trump’s.
Previously, there had been exactly one impeachment in the first 200-plus years of the republic. That was President Andrew Johnson in 1868. However, the Senate fell one vote short of removing Johnson, and he served out the term he had inherited when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
It also is true that President Richard M. Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached in 1974 and very likely would have been removed by the Senate. When Republican elders, including U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, met with Nixon to tell him he was doomed, he resigned instead.
Now, we are faced with yet another impeachment. Not good. Unlike Johnson and Nixon, modern impeachment has become highly partisan, which means that, as a logical technique for actual removal, it is doomed short of a partisan supermajority in the Senate (not something seen since 1965).
For example, the Republican majority in the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998. The charge was high crimes and misdemeanors, i.e., perjury in testimony to a grand jury. Despite the fact that this allegation was demonstrably true, the charge went nowhere in the Senate — not even getting all Republicans. Ironically, a few months later, a federal judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, found Clinton guilty and suspended his law license — a federal judge Clinton approved since he’s from Arkansas.
This Clinton impeachment proved a bad idea. Republicans paid a price for an unpopular move later that year when they lost seats in the House. Clinton concluded his presidency two years later, more popular than ever.
Fast-forward 25 years. Hello, Trump derangement syndrome. Trump makes a phone call to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, which is promptly leaked by a junior member of the White House national security staff. Democrats go ballistic because it involves Joe Biden. They argue that the phone call is a high crime or misdemeanor because it is political.
This is at least debatable because any president’s Article II (of the Constitution) power gives him virtually unlimited authority to conduct foreign policy. Not to the point of ordering an assassination, perhaps, but almost. Nancy Pelosi’s House Democratic majority votes to impeach. The Senate conducts a trial and falls miles short of a two-thirds majority.
Then comes the election, and Jan. 6, 2021. The lame-duck House votes to impeach again. Almost no evidence of Trump leading the riot is offered because there is none. The Senate again falls miles short of removal.
So, now, the Republican House wants to impeach President Biden. There’s plenty of smoke but a couple problems. One is whether the president can be impeached and removed for actions taken while he was vice president. There seems little doubt that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, received millions of dollars for doing — what? There seems no doubt at all that other members of the Biden family profited from this situation. The Biden family business, in other words, was Joe Biden and access to him.
Unlike criminal law, impeachment and removal does not require evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Such evidence clearly existed in Andrew Johnson’s case. The Tenure in Office Act, which barred the president from firing any member of his Cabinet without the consent of the Senate, had been enacted by Johnson’s Republican opponents specifically to keep Johnson from firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson had fired Stanton.
Similarly, there isn’t much doubt that Nixon advocated and sanctioned the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate building. Clinton and Trump: less clear. Or not clear at all. Or worse, purely political.
The Founding Fathers did not intend for it to work this way. Impeachment should be rare and the evidence very clear to all Americans.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
