What would it take to impeach and convict a president?
Asked Daniel in Brookline:
I have often wondered what it would take to get a President impeached.
Granted, the Constitution deliberately set a very high bar ”” which is why all of three Presidents in U.S. history have been impeached, and none convicted. Still ”” what would it take?
One glib answer is “a Republican president”. But no, that’s not the answer either ”” or we would have seen serious attempts to impeach George W. Bush, who was probably the most reviled Republican president in my lifetime. (I don’t think he deserved to be impeached, by any stretch of the imagination”¦ but the desire was certainly there.)
Once politicians liked to say that they were safe, unless caught with a dead girl or a live boy. I don’t think either would suffice anymore.
I would submit that it’s not about the offense. An offense is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.
One thing it would take could be a situation where a majority of representatives in the House and 2/3 of the senators are from the opposition party from the president, but we are unlikely to have that wide a split government. But if we did, the members of the opposition party in Congress could always find something in a president’s behavior to call a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Otherwise, it would take a party with enough members to whom principles are more important than party. Although I think that is slightly more likely to happen with Republicans than with Democrats in Congress, it’s highly unlikely with either party.
The impeachment part is easy, if there’s a majority of the opposite party. The 2/3 Senate bar is much higher, and purposely so. But to answer Daniel’s question, Watergate plus the Republican Party of 1974 was enough to do it, because so many leading Republicans turned on Nixon and informed him that, if he didn’t resign, he would be impeached and almost certainly convicted. Watergate was the proximate cause of Nixon’s resignation, but there is no doubt in my mind that if it had been committed by a Democrat of the time, that president would have served his full term without much threat. And if it all happened today, I’m not sure that present-day Republicans would act the same way Nixon’s Republicans did.
The terms “a very high bar” are dubious in themselves at least on some grounds. The bar set by the framers is a distinctly political bar in the fullest sense of political, that is, the political taken as such. The fullest sense of political in this context in turn can be very low indeed. This is not to say “low” as a bad thing, necessarily, as a pejorative so to speak, insofar as modern natural right theory itself is intentionally based on the very low but solid, as per Hobbes; the fear of violent death. A political lowest common denominator, by analogy. So it is that “high” in this context appears mostly to mean widely accepted, or very widely accepted, in contradistinction to highly virtuous, say. There we dwell in the realm of opinion, in the world of the cave: politics.
sdferr:
I was referring to the high bar of a 2/3 vote in the Senate, and that’s all I was referring to.
“Once politicians liked to say that they were safe, unless caught with a dead girl or a live boy.”
Make that a singular politician: Edwin Edwards said that about his re-election chances in one of his four successful runs for governor of Louisiana, totaling 16 years.
Daniel left out the key phrase “caught in bed with….”
I don’t believe any other US politician has had the brass or the balls to say that. Not even Abedin’s wiener.
Edwards was later convicted of a variety of financial crimes committed while governor, and did nine years in prison, commencing in 2002.
He ran for Congress just two years ago, at age 87, having completed his post-prison parole the year before.
His 3rd wife is 37 years younger, and he still has all his marbles.
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No discussion of Presidential impeachment can overlook the fact that Democrats can and always have put their party above their country. Except maybe Edwards, who always puts himself first.
Actually neo-neocon, I was more directly reacting to the phrase as it first shows up in Daniel’s statement. But I guess in the end the gist would apply to most any such figure of speech.
I should say the import of “high bar” in context is more truly pegged to the high jumper who faces a great difficulty, so in that narrow sense it’s perfectly true of impeachment and conviction: it is very difficult. Just not especially rigorous.
Not sure, Neo, that even a Democratic president could have survived the televised Watergate hearings. They were dynamite, and a huge audience was glued to their TV sets watching them.
Ann:
Remember the Clinton impeachment? I rest my case.
Yes, I do. But the audience/the country, was very, very different in 1973.
A Black or female president will never be impeached.
Impeaching a President requires rule of law.
America is a banana republic.
Ann:
“Yes, I do. But the audience/the country, was very, very different in 1973.”
The general will of We The People has always been a function of activism. If an impeachment is primarily a social political action rather than a substantive legal and/or policy action, then the heightened variable is whether the President has sufficient activism supporting his cause. Clinton did (Moveon, etc). Nixon did not.
Neo:
“I would submit that it’s not about the offense. An offense is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.”
There still has to be some plausible cause of action to wrap the effort around.
Daniel in Brookline:
“One glib answer is “a Republican president”. But no, that’s not the answer either – or we would have seen serious attempts to impeach George W. Bush, who was probably the most reviled Republican president in my lifetime.”
Reviled, yes, but also ethical and conscientious.
Democrat-front Left activists indeed successfully executed a calculated vilification of President Bush to seize the strategic high ground in the greater political contest, conceded by the Right and GOP.
However, Bush didn’t offer a plausible cause of action for impeachment.
He was ethical – there was no sordid Lewinsky affair or Watergate break-in. Bush conducted himself with respect for his office.
He was conscientious in his duties. Which is to say, Bush crosses his t’s and dotted his i’s with executive procedure and his relations with the other 2 branches, including with the issues that were spun as controversies by Left activists. Bush worked and consulted with Congress. He abided by court rulings.
Oops. Must have not closed the bold.
Daniel in Brookline:
“One glib answer is “a Republican president”. But no, that’s not the answer either – or we would have seen serious attempts to impeach George W. Bush, who was probably the most reviled Republican president in my lifetime.”
Reviled, yes, but also ethical and conscientious.
Democrat-front Left activists indeed successfully executed a calculated vilification of President Bush to seize the strategic high ground in the greater political contest, conceded by the Right and GOP.
However, Bush didn’t offer a plausible cause of action for impeachment.
He was ethical — there was no sordid Lewinsky affair or Watergate break-in. Bush conducted himself with respect for his office.
He was conscientious in his duties. Which is to say, Bush crosses his t’s and dotted his i’s with executive procedure and his relations with the other 2 branches, including with the issues that were spun as controversies by Left activists. Bush worked and consulted with Congress. He abided by court rulings.
Not to get all Trumpy on a non-Trump thread, but he’d get impeached and convicted within 6 months of taking office. Contempt for the Constitution + neither party having any interest in protecting him. Add in the fact that he’d probably be bored with the office, and want to prove that he was as tough as Bill Clinton, he’d practically goad Congress into it.
Cornhead Says:
“A Black or female president will never be impeached.”
Clinton was doubleplusgood then, by virtue of being the first black lesbian president.
Three presidents were impeached? I got Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Who’s the third?
If Trump gets the Republican nomination, look for him to select as VP an individual fully as defective as him, as insurance against a bipartisan coalition in the House & Senate voting to impeach, convict and remove him from office.
We might eventually want an amendment that makes conviction in the Senate easier. Then, again, with Obama, had the GOP had the necessary guts to impeach him in the House, the impossibility of his being convicted in the Senate would have been a feature, not a bug.
I tried my blogger’s best to get the GOP to issue a serious impeachment-threat in 2014: http://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/384310/case-formally-threatening-obama-impeachment-right-now-carl-eric-scott No-one who counted listened, and it’s things like that that are part of the reason we now face the shameful possibility of a Trump nomination.
Only two impeached: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.
I think you were right when you said it would be a republican President. As you said, several republican Senators told Nixon he wouldn’t survive.
I think that republican Senators would be more likely to vote the personal beliefs than party line, I propose that if, parties reversed, the impeachment vote in 1999 would have been very much close. I am not prepared to say that the impeachment would have been approved.
Instead all 45 democratic Senators voted against all impeachment charges. To further demonstrate my position, 10 republicans voted against at least one impeachment count.
In 1974, I have absolutely no doubt that a democratic President would have completed his term. I have my doubts that the impeachment charges would have even passed, let alone removal from office
Only two were impeached. Johnson and Clinton.
Nixon had articles approved by a house committee but the articles were never voted on by the whole House.
He designed before the vote.
Richard Nixon designed before he was born.
Nixon was hounded from office* by a viciously antagonistic and vengeance-minded media, for what amounts to talking about misdeeds that Barack Obama magnified and then turned into the cornerstone policy of his administration. Obama’s complete transformation of the IRS into a partisan weapon that alone dwarfs anything Nixon contemplated. For this alone Obama should have been impeached and convicted; never mind his repeated acts of lawlessness, unbridled corruption and defiance of the Constitution, particularly his trampling of the separation of powers.
Obama’s crimes are shocking in not only their number, but their nature and extent as well. From his similar corruption of the Department of Justice into a partisan scourge to protect his cronies and punish his enemies; his lies to the country about his knowledge of and role in the Benghazi debacle and his cowardly betrayal and needless sacrifice of four brave Americans; his incredibly cynical anti-firearm Operation Fast and Furious which has cost the lives of an untold number of innocent Americans and Mexicans; to, worst of all, his attempted coup-by-illegal-alien, by which he has ignored his explicit duty under our immigration laws in order to fashion a permanent Democrat voting advantage by counterfeiting voters out of citizens of Mexico and Latin America whom he has invited to illegally enter the US. These are just the most egregious, major impeachable offenses, and don’t begin to reach the financial and political corruption Obama has engendered through his “crony capitalism”.
It matters not a whit that partisanship has so corrupted Congressional Democrats, or that the imperative to appeasement has so infected Congressional Republicans, that obtaining a conviction, if not passing the very articles of impeachment, would be doubtful. His crimes cry out for redress, and justice demands a reckoning. When courage and principle was needed, the GOP leadership responded with cringing and fear, for which many are soon to pay the penalty. It is history’s shame that no one in Congress had the moral courage to even attempt to hold Barack Obama to account for unprecedented crimes.
* He was not impeached. The House Judiciary Committee
recommended impeachment, but there was never a vote taken by the House of Representatives.