EDITORIAL: Senate faces history of impeachment

Published 9:00 am Thursday, January 23, 2020

The impeachment trial this week in the Senate is historic but not unprecedented. 

The Senate, the nation and the presidency have been here before. Though rarely, but more in recent decades than in the entire history of the country.

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President Donald J. Trump is among the small number of American presidents to be impeached. Impeachment is like an indictment, one passed by the congressional House of Representatives then sent to the Senate for trial.  

Though rarely used in American history, 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. Results so certain that GOP congressmen warned the Republican Nixon that House impeachment and Senate conviction were almost certain. Nixon chose to resign.

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 discussed impeaching President George W. Bush for his handling of the War on Terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when Democrats won control of Congress, 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 Republicans, 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 asked 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, who 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.”

Does President Trump fit that definition?

The House may well think so. This week, it’s up to the Senate to decide.