The Polarized Impeachment
“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0
A version of this essay originally appeared in the Autumn 2019 edition of the Virginia Review of Politics Magazine.
Within the current polarized political climate in the U.S., calls for impeaching President Donald Trump are not surprising. Liberal media outlets like The New York Times constantly publish articles in favor of impeachment, but they tend to oversimplify its inherently political nature. No president has been removed from office through impeachment. The absence of successful impeachment is not coincidental. The difficulty of successful impeachments reflects the healthy functioning of the Constitution, which relies on the necessary conflicts between political parties.
The Constitution
The Constitution’s terms for impeachment are vague. Article II section 4 states, “The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason is explicitly laid out in the Constitution, and the definition of bribery is clear. On the other hand, the interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is flexible and, consequently, the source of political controversy. In 1970, the then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford evaluated the outcome of its vagueness:
"An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history; conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office. The historical context and political climate are important.”
It is virtually impossible for the Constitution to lay out all the impeachable crimes. Evaluating whether a president has breached laws or abused powers that warrants an impeachment is highly subjective. The House of Representatives has the utter discretion to initiate an impeachment. The Article I Section 2 of the Constitution states“The House of Representatives... shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” If the impeachment inquiry initiated by the House has found substantial evidence against the president, it can present the approved articles of impeachment to the Senate. The Senate issues the verdict on the impeachment. Article I Section 3 of the Constitution states, “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” Even the Senate has the power to try the president, but it can only judge the impeachment case if the House brings it to the Senate floor. In other words, even though the Senate and the House both have critical roles in an impeachment process, they can only determine part of the impeachment.
Now, the question is, what if the House and Senate happen to be dominated by people who disagree with the president in every single way imaginable? Can the Congress then impeach the president on any arbitrary basis? Theoretically, yes. Practically, the arbitrary impeachment of a president has never happened since the inception of Constitution. How do we reconcile the jarring disparity between the theoretical flaw of the Constitution and its practical application? Other parts of the Constitution may offer an answer. Article I Section 2 of the Constitution states, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people.” The “people” as a homogeneous concept does not exist. “People” have different, often conflicting, views and interests. For instance, some may want more government funding for schools, while others may want to be taxed less. Each Representative serves the interests of their own constituents, and the relatively short, two-year election cycle makes them more responsive to their constituency; They all have to address the interests of their constituents to get re-elected. Therefore, the decision of the House, including impeachment, may be arbitrary, but it is always a difficult compromise of these conflicting interests. The Senate operates based on a similar mechanism. Article I Section 3 of the Constitution states that “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.” People directly vote for each Senators (Although prior to the 17th amendment in 1913, the state legislature chose their Senator. But the Senator still represented the people in their corresponding state). Thus, the House and the Senate, the Congress, become microscopic platforms for vast compromises of conflicting views and interests of American people. Politics in Congress is divisive because people who elect their political actors are drastically different. Polarization of political views is healthy because it authentically reflects and represents the larger public. This polarization in Congress may stall progress, but it prevents radical political maneuvers such as impeachment. Therefore, unlimited power of the Congress to impeach the president does not exist. The history of impeachment demonstrates the healthy working of such checks and balances mechanism, even though the dramatic tension between the legislative and executive branch fuels it.
History of Impeachment
Only two U.S. presidential impeachment cases have been to the Senate – Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Richard Nixon resigned before the impeachment vote in the House. For this reason, his resignation will not be discussed extensively in this article.
The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868 was the first in U.S. history. The Radical Republicans controlled the Congress after the Civil War. The political tension between the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic President Johnson escalated over bills regarding rights of the newly freed slaves and secessionist states. In 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, making it illegal for the president to appoint or to remove civil officers from office without the approval of the Senate. Essentially, the Congress tried to restrict President Johnson’s executive power. In defiance of this act, President Johnson suspended his Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who opposed Johnson’s reconstruction policy. He appointed Ulysses S. Grant secretary of war as a replacement when Congress was in recess. In response, the House of Representatives drafted 11 clauses of impeachment against the president. The case was presented to the Senate, which voted 35-19 against the president. It was one vote short of a two-thirds majority needed to remove the president from office. Moderate Republicans in the Senate saved President Johnson because they detested Benjamin Wade, a Radical Republican, more than him. The impeachment was largely politically driven. As President Gerald Ford argues, the initiation of impeachment is highly subjective. The alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” of President Johnson were due to policy disagreement between himself and Congress. The conflict between the Democrat president and the Republican-controlled Congress in the Reconstruction Era sparked the impeachment process.
The second impeachment of a U.S. president was that of Bill Clinton in 1999 after his revelation of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The case was brought to the Senate on the grounds of two clauses: lying under oath and obstruction of justice. All 45 Democratic senators voted for “not guilty,” along with some swing votes from the Republicans. The partisan support of President Clinton in the Senate made the two-thirds votes necessary to remove him from office impossible. Alexander Hamilton observed that impeachment was a demonstration of “comparative strength of parties, rather than that of innocence or guilt.” Clearly in Clinton’s case, the Democrats clearly overpowered the Republicans in the Senate. President Clinton remained in office as a result of the strength of Democratic Party and not due to his “innocence or guilt.”
Impeachment of President Trump
Like the impeachment cases in history, the impeachment inquiry of President Trump also reflects extraordinary partisan conflicts. On September 24, 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of impeachment inquiry against President Trump. Speaker Pelosi, a Democrat, condemned vehemently about President Trump’s “betrayal of oath of office and national security”. But in the House, the positions of House Representatives on the impeachment inquiry are clearly divided along party lines, according to a New York Times survey. While 225 out of 235 Democrats support “a formal investigation into the president’s actions”, 183 Republicans oppose and 14 Republicans gave no response. In other words, almost half of the Representatives in the House disagree with the serious charges that Speaker Pelosi brought up against President Trump. These Republican Congressmen characterize the impeachment inquiry as “baseless”, “reckless”, and “laughable”. Politicians in the House who do agree with Speaker Pelosi are, not surprisingly, Democrats. But if the impeachment inquiry is based on substantial evidence rather than partisan politics, the overwhelming bipartisanship support for the inquiry should be seen in the House. Supporters of impeaching President Trump may cite the Mueller Report or his phone call with the Ukrainian President, but both of which failed to generate substantial evidence to undermine the coalition of Republicans in the House against the impeachment. This coalition of Republicans in the House reflects “a disciplined tribalism of a ferocity” in the stance of Republican Party against the impeachment. Even if the articles of impeachment can be brought to the Senate, it is highly unlikely that the Republican-controlled Senate will convict President Trump. The impeachment inquiry simply reflects the dissent of the Democratic Party with the administrative styles and policies of the Trump administration. The failure to remove President Trump from office is foreseeable.
After President Clinton’s acquittal, he received his all-time high public poll approval rating of around 70 percent. The public may have condemned him for his sexual misconduct, but the strong economic growth of the 1990s may have cushioned the fallout from the president’s alleged moral deficiencies. On the other hand, the Republican Congressmen who tried to convict him seemed to trivialize the economic growth and general prosperity of the country at that time. A similar thing may happen to President Trump. Given the general good prospects of the economy under the Trump Administration and the foreseeable failure of impeaching him, American voters may likely side with President Trump. With the presidential election coming up, the Democrats may undermine their chances of winning by focusing on impeaching Trump recklessly.
One may argue that the history of impeachment does not predict the outcome of the current impeachment. Every impeachment in history redefines politics and our understanding of it. However, despite the drastic differences in the cause, historical context and political climate of each impeachment, one thing remains unchanged: what the Constitution stands for. That is, the interests of the people which are always diverse and even conflicting. These varied interests often lead their elected officials, be it Democrats or Republicans, to come into conflict. The election of President Trump certainly reflected America’s polarization. But the Constitution allows such polarizing political conflicts like the partisan divide on impeaching President Trump. The political conflicts represent the conflicting interests of people at large. The history of impeachment reflects in partisanship conflicts representing the authentic collison and the healthy compromise of people’s interests under one Constitution, and one government. Without these conflicts and compromises, the government will be either dysfunctional or totalitarian.