EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about impeachment on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, in video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
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Should They Impeach This President?
Here’s a trick trivia question for you: Was Nixon impeached, convicted and removed from office? The answer is actually … yes.
However, I’m not talking about Richard Nixon but one Walter Nixon, a federal judge in Mississippi who was convicted by the U.S. Senate in 1989.
No President has ever been removed from office for, as they famously put it, high crimes and misdemeanors, though two have been impeached.
President Nixon certainly would have been impeached and convicted, but he quit before either of those things could happen. The only federal officials ever removed via the impeachment and conviction process were a handful of judges.
Which is as it should be. When I was growing up, impeachment was seen much as we saw the hydrogen bomb. A good weapon to have – just to make sure you never had to use it. But then came Nixon and Watergate.
I was in my early twenties then, and I remember the intense emotion with which both Republicans and Democrats watched the house Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings. The voices of congressmen of both parties quavered and broke as they found themselves voting, almost unbelievably, to impeach a president.
The only other time that had happened was in 1868, when the U.S. Senate came within a single vote of convicting and removing Andrew Johnson from office.
Historians later almost unanimously agreed that removing Johnson would have been a terrible mistake, even though he was a weak president and an unlikeable man. But as a lonely senator named Lyman Trumbull noted in John F. Kennedy’s famous book, Profiles in Courage, if impeachment became a regular thing, “No future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed by them important.”
That was enough to deter impeachment efforts for more than a century. Nixon, however, was so clearly guilty – he taped himself committing obstruction of justice – that impeachment became thinkable again.
That led to the farce called the Bill Clinton impeachment in 1998. Clinton had a history of irresponsible sexual behavior, and had lied about it, so Republicans impeached him because they had the votes to do so.
They never came close to convicting him in the Senate, and it isn’t clear whether Clinton or the Republicans were more damaged by all of this. What is clear is that this wasn’t good for our nation, and set a bad precedent.
That does not, however, mean that impeachment may not be justified in the case of Donald J. Trump. To my way of thinking, his own notes of the July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky provides ample grounds for at least an impeachment inquiry, and there are many other troubling things as well.
There’s also this question to consider: If a President has clearly committed impeachable offenses, does the House have the right not to act?
Two things seem very clear to those in the know. They are that first, the House is virtually certain to impeach the President, and second, the Senate will ever convict him, because at least 20 Republicans would have to desert the President.
Both things may be true. But I think we should also remember what another Senator voting against his party said at the time of the Johnson impeachment: Say to my friends that I am sworn to do impartial justice according to law and conscience, and I will try to do it like an honest man.”
This is Jack Lessenberry. Thanks for listening.
