Abstract
This contribution discusses the circumstances and conditions under which Congress decides to impeach a president—and when it prefers to evade or repudiate the political demands to remove him from office. It compares the philosophical debate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia with the most intriguing cases of impeachment debates in the 23 decades thereafter. It asks why the House of Representatives did impeach Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and was willing to impeach Richard Nixon, whereas it tabled so many other attempts to prosecute a president. It also examines why the Senate was all but certain to convict Nixon but acquitted Johnson and Clinton. Finally, it draws some lessons from the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton precedents with respect to the impeachment debate today: Could the 45th President of the United States be impeached—and should he be? The answer to both is unequivocally: Yes. In order to confront what has turned into a constitutional crisis and to prevent a further erosion of democracy, the impeachment of Donald Trump—after thorough investigations and public hearings in Congress—will be indispensable.
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Notes
- 1.
The manuscript was finished on May 30, 2019 amidst heated impeachment debate in the House of Representatives and especially in the Democratic caucus.
- 2.
It is hard to understand from today’s perspective that a presidential use of the veto power could amount to some sort of constitutional crisis. But in the contemporary Whig conception of legislative supremacy, presidential vetos should be restricted to unequivocally unconstitutional bills and not be used to obstruct Congressional policies. Furthermore, pocket vetos were regarded as plainly unconstitutional because they constituted, in the words of Whig Congressman Daniel Webster, a “silent veto” and “a great practical augmentation” of presidential power (Gerhardt 2013, p. 37, note 20).
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Horst, P. (2020). The Politics of Removal: The Impeachment of a President. In: Oswald, M.T. (eds) Mobilization, Representation, and Responsiveness in the American Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24792-8_4
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