Impeachment is rare.

A president being impeached twice is unprecedented.

Before anyone argues that President Donald Trump was not impeached the first time. That is not true. 

He was impeached. The Senate refused to convict. 

But the impeachment still stands. An impeachment is similar to a grand jury indictment. 

So far, no impeached president has ever been convicted by the Senate.

Trump is among a small number of presidents to be impeached. He is the only one to be impeached twice.

Still, impeachment has been brandished and proposed more in the past five decades than in the nearly two preceding centuries of the nation’s history.

The word impeachment has been regularly spoken since the threat of impeachment and likely conviction of President Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s.

Some critics spoke of impeachment during the Iran-Contra Affair investigations during President Ronald Reagan’s administration but it was never weighed seriously even as Reagan officials faced criminal charges.

President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but the Senate refused to convict him.

Some critics tossed around the idea of impeaching President George W. Bush for his handling of the War on Terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan but it was never taken seriously. When Democrats won control of Congress during his presidential administration, they refused to seek impeachment proceedings against Bush 43.

In “Impeachment: An American History,” four historians look at the history of impeachment and the American presidency.

Jon Meacham delves into the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the Southern Democrat vice president who took office after Republican President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War.

Even though Johnson wished to maintain the Union and see the South returned to the nation, he was still a Southerner and a Democrat suddenly thrust into leading an administration filled with northern Republicans and at odds with a GOP-dominated Congress. A government that had just won a hard-fought war but led by a man who wanted to maintain the Southern way of life in a world where slaves had been freed and the South was forced back into the Union.

A few attempts were made to impeach Johnson. The actual impeachment failed by one vote to convict him.

Meacham notes though history views Johnson as ineffective and racist, the move to impeach him was more about differences in policy rather than the bribery, treason or high crimes and misdemeanors stipulated in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment.

For a hundred-plus years, Johnson’s case was seen as an argument against impeachment. 

Many leaders have reasoned who has the right to usurp the presidency of a person lawfully elected by the people. And in many cases, the people could oust the president simply by not reelecting him in a few short years or less.

So, impeachment was not seriously considered again until Nixon. 

Historian Timothy Naftali writes how Watergate investigations were heading toward impeachment and likely conviction of Nixon. Impeachment was so certain Nixon resigned from office before proceedings could begin.

While nearly a century passed between the creation of the nation and the first impeachment and more than a century between Johnson and Nixon, it was less than a quarter century between Nixon and the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

In the “Impeachment” book, Jeffrey A. Engel pulls double duty writing about Trump and the Constitution.

In the Constitution chapter, Engel explores the tenets of impeachment hammered out during the Constitutional Convention.

Founders feared too much power resting in the hands of one man; they did not wish a return to monarchy after spending several bloody years gaining full independence from Great Britain and its king.

Engel notes founders knew George Washington would be the first president. They knew he was human but knew through experience of his service as general of the Continental Army that his integrity was, well, unimpeachable.

Given Washington’s penchant for putting the good of country before his own welfare, Engel proposes the founders would consider “the absence of virtue – evidenced by a president’s concern for his own welfare above and beyond the public’s, whose fate he is entrusted to preserve – is the best sign we have that the founders would have wanted him impeached.”

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times.