Past Presidential Impeachment Trials

With former President of the United States Donald Trump being impeached a second time, it is important to understand the context and meaning of the impeachment process. Only three presidents in the history of the United States have been impeached - Andrew Johnson (1868), Bill Clinton (1998) and Donald Trump (2020&2021). However, none of the three men who faced impeachment in the United States’ 250-year-old history have ever been removed from office. As we await the decision regarding Donald Trump’s second impeachment, we’ll take a look at what impeachment is, why it exists, how the trial unfolds and past impeachments before Trump’s ‘double’ impeachments.

What is an impeachment?

The United States Constitution provides that the House of Representatives "shall have the sole Power of Impeachment" (Article I, section 2) and that "the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments…[but] no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present" (Article I, section 3). The president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States are subject to impeachment. 1 Impeachment is the tool the US Constitution provides Congress to punish serious misconduct from the president. This misconduct can be treason or bribery, or it can fall into a vaguer, broader category of “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” 2

“In impeachment proceedings, the House of Representatives charges an official of the federal government by approving, by majority vote, articles of impeachment. A committee of representatives, called “managers”, acts as prosecutors before the Senate. The Senate sits as a High Court of Impeachment in which senators consider evidence, hear witnesses, and vote to acquit or convict the impeached official. In the case of presidential impeachment trials, the chief justice of the United States presides. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict, and the penalty for an impeached official upon conviction is removal from office. In some cases, the Senate has also disqualified such officials from holding public offices in the future. There is no appeal. Since 1789, about half of Senate impeachment trials have resulted in conviction and removal from office.” 1

Simply put, in order for an elected official - we will now only be focusing on the office of the president of the United States - to be removed from office, the House of Representatives votes by majority on the articles of impeachment. If one or more of the articles passes, the official is impeached and proceedings move to the impeachment trial.

During the impeachment trial, the prosecutors of the case are a committee of representatives. The official impeached has his or her own lawyer defending them throughout the trial. The Senate acts as the High Court of Impeachment; after hearing witnesses and considering the evidence, the Senate votes on whether the official should be impeached. A two-thirds majority (supermajority) is required on this vote, and a conviction results in the removal from office and the disqualification from holding any public offices in the future (disqualification from holding “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States” 2).

Some call impeachment the ‘emergency brake ’ of the US Constitution on abuses of power; regardless of the fact that the Constitution has numerous safeguards against the abuse of power of any elected official, impeachment is used as the ultimate procedure to keep officials in check.

History of Impeachments

The concept of impeachment originated in England and was adopted by many of the American colonial governments and state constitutions. As adopted by the framers, this congressional power is a fundamental component of the constitutional system of “checks and balances.” Through the impeachment process, Congress charges and then tries an official of the federal government for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was not specified in the Constitution and has long been subject to debate. 1

The term “high crimes and misdemeanors” came out of the British common law tradition: it was the sort of offense that Parliament cited in removing crown officials for centuries. Essentially, it means an abuse of power by a high-level public official. This does not necessarily have to be a violation of an ordinary criminal statute. 3

In 1788, as supporters of the Constitution were urging states to ratify the document, Alexander Hamilton described impeachable crimes in one of the Federalist Papers as “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 3

The first official to have been impeached in the United States was William Blount, one of the two first senators of Tennessee. He was impeached in 1789 for having conspired with the British to negotiate the expulsion of the Spanish from Louisiana, offering the territory to the United Kingdom. 4

Since then, the House has launched over 60 impeachment investigations, out of which only 19 were further investigated. All impeachments that have passed with a supermajority in the Senate have been of judges, who were removed from office and barred from ever taking a public office again.

Past Impeachments

Andrew Johnson

During the years immediately following the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson clashed repeatedly with the Republican-controlled Congress over the reconstruction of the defeated South. Johnson vetoed legislation that Congress passed to protect the rights of those who had been freed from slavery. This clash culminated in the House of Representatives voting, on February 24, 1868, to impeach the president. On March 5, the trial began in the Senate, where Republicans held more seats than the two-thirds majority required to remove Johnson from office. When the trial concluded on May 16, however, the president had won acquittal, not because a majority of senators supported his policies but because a sufficient minority wished to protect the office of the president and preserve the constitutional balance of powers. 5

Johnson was impeached because of his abuse of power in the office of the president; namely, he dismissed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton without consulting the Congress. In response, the House of Representatives voted articles of impeachment against the president - the first such occurrence in U.S. history. While the focus was on Johnson’s removal of Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, the president was also accused of bringing “into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States.” 6

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton was impeached on October 8, 1998, following the vote in the House of Representatives that triggered the commencement of impeachment procedures. The charges that Clinton faced were perjury (lying under oath) and obstruction of justice, which the House of Representatives catalogued as ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’.

The charges stemmed from a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton, where he was accused of having engaged in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern at that time. A scandal erupted after Clinton lied under oath, thus catalyzing the impeachment. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, on grounds of perjury to a grand jury (first article, 228–206) and obstruction of justice (third article, 221–212). 7

Conclusions

Bill Clinton was acquitted following the impeachment trial, just as Andrew Johnson was, a hundred years earlier. None of the presidents who have been impeached until now have been removed from office, partially because of the delicate balance of power that has to be maintained in the country. Removing a democratically elected president from office upsets the very balance that Democrats and Republicans have been fighting to defend since the creation of the United States.

However, as former president Donald Trump was impeached a second time, making him the only individual in US history to have been impeached twice during his first term as president of the United States, many fear that the balance of powers has irremediably shifted. Will Donald Trump be acquitted once more or will he be the first president whose impeachment trial ends in a conviction?

Bibliography

1 “Impeachment”, The United States Senate. (https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Senate_Impeachment_Role.htm).

2 Prokop, A., “The second impeachment of Donald Trump, explained”, Vox. January, 2021. (https://www.vox.com/22223972/trump-impeached-house-senate-trial-former-president).

3 Savage, C., “How the Impeachment Process Works”, The New York Times. Published September, 2019. Updated January, 2021. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/impeachment).

4 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "William Blount." Encyclopedia Britannica, April 12, 2020. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blount).

5 “The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (1868) President of the United States”, The United States Senate. (https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Impeachment_Johnson.htm).

6 Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Andrew Johnson." Encyclopedia Britannica, December 25, 2020. (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrew-Johnson).

7 Roos, David, "How Many US Presidents Have Faced Impeachment?", History.com. A&E Television Networks. November, 2019. (https://www.history.com/.amp/news/how-many-presidents-impeached)

Gendler, A., “How does impeachment work?”, TED-Ed, Youtube. August, 2017. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSszixvo7d8)

Law, T., “What to Know About the U.S. Presidents Who’ve Been Impeached”, TIME. Published March, 2019. Updated January, 2021. (https://time.com/5552679/impeached-presidents/)

Law, T., “Here's How the Process of Impeachment Actually Works - And What Happened Last Time the U.S. Went Down That Road”, TIME. November, 2019. (https://time.com/5477435/impeachment-clinton/)