Top 10 Facts About The Impeachment Process

According to the U.S. Constitution, civil officers – extending to presidents and vice presidents – can face impeachment on the grounds of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. In the event that an official is formally charged or accused, the House of Representatives votes on whether or not to impeach. Even if the majority vote is in favor of impeachment, the official isn’t immediately removed from office. The case is then taken to the Senate where the vice-president supervises the trial. If it’s the president who’s on trial, though, the Supreme Court’s chief justice must oversee matters. Following the trial, two-thirds of the Senate needs to vote in support of a conviction to effectively end the president’s term. Otherwise, the president remains in power.

So, an official commits any of the aforementioned acts and BOOM, the impeachment process can start, right? Actually, it’s far more complicated than that. Yes, Article II, section 4 of the Constitution does state that an official can be impeached for treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. What the Constitution doesn’t spell out is how to define any of these offenses. There’s a lot of gray area in high crimes and misdemeanors, making it difficult for the people in charge to determine what constitutes grounds for impeachment. There’s also the matter of how strong the evidence needs to be in order to move forward with the impeachment process. Since the standards aren’t crystal clear, getting an impeachment off the ground is an uphill battle.

When it comes to impeachment inquires, simply getting the ball rolling can be a vague procedure. When Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton faced potential impeachment, the House voted for the House Judiciary Committee to begin an investigation, as per the procedure mentioned previously. However, it’s been debated if this step is even required. When the impeachment pertains to an official other than the president, it can be started merely at the committee level. So, can Congress just skip that extra step of a full vote? One way or another, there’s no telling if the House in 2019 will vote in favor of an impeachment inquiry. Of course, in recent years, the number of Democrats who approve of impeachment has notably increased within the House.

As long as there’s a multi-party system, the United States is always going to be rife with political rivalries. Even when a president has high approval ratings, not everybody in Congress is going to see eye to eye with their politics, to say the least. A president has never been forced to exit office directly by means of impeachment. If grounds for impeachment did boil down to partisan differences, though, chances are nobody would stay in office for long. That’s not to say that political agendas don’t factor into impeachment, of course. At the end of the day, however, the person facing impeachment is judged based on the crimes and accusations against them. In this sense, the laws etched out in the U.S. Constitution have maintained balance in a contentious political system.

One might assume that the Supreme Court has the power to impeach a sitting president, seeing how it’s the chief justice who takes charge at the Senate trial. If the House does vote in favor of impeachment, however, the president’s fate isn’t the Supreme Court’s call to make. Although the chief justice presides over the trial, the Senate serves as the jury and ultimately decides if the president will be removed from office. The Supreme Court actually ruled in 1993 that impeachment trials couldn’t be held anywhere outside of Congress.

The word “impeachment” has been tossed around so much since Donald Trump was sworn into office that it’s easy to forget that this process doesn’t just apply to the president. In 1797, Tennessee senator William Blount became the country’s first official to face impeachment for conspiring with Great Britain. In 1876, the House impeached U.S. Secretary of War William W. Belknap for his involvement in the trader post scandal. Evan Mecham went down at the first Arizona governor to be impeached in 1988 for obstruction of justice and misusing government funds. Arguably the most notorious person to be impeached on a state level was Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was removed from office in 2009 for corruption, which included bribery.

Once the House votes to impeach, the Senate is expected to hold a trial, the keyword being “expected.” Technically, a majority of the senators could vote to delay the trial or dismiss the case entirely. If a majority leader tries to prevent a trial, there’s no straight-forward method to make them comply. A key example would be when President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to arrange a confirmation hearing for Garland, however, allowing his nomination to expire. With impeachment, it’s not clear if convening the senate would rest on the shoulders of the majority leader or the chief justice. In any case, the trial could very well be over before it even begins.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where impeachment has been a hot button issue. Otto Pérez Molina, the 48th President of Guatemala, was impeached in 2015 for accepting bribes. Not only was Molina stripped of his position, but he was also arrested and has remained in custody ever since. In 2016, the 36th President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office for violating budgetary laws. That same year, the National Assembly of South Korea voted to impeach their 18th president, Park Geun-hye. Following her removal from office, Park was arrested for abusing power, bribery, and leaking government information. Compared to these countries, impeachments in the U.S. haven’t been nearly as successful, at least on a presidential level.

When most Americans think of impeachment, Richard Nixon is usually the first name that comes to mind… or at least it was. What many fail to realize is that America’s 37th president actually wasn’t impeached in the wake of the Watergate scandal. After the Democratic National Committee headquarters was burglarized on June 17, 1972, and evidence of wrongdoing later came to light, the House of Representatives instituted an investigation. Once the White House’s involvement became apparent,, the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of impeaching Nixon on several counts, including obstruction of justice. Before the vote reached the House, however, the president resigned from office on August 9, 1974. We’ll never know for sure what the final outcome might’ve been had Nixon remained in office, but impeachment appeared almost inevitable.

Out of the 60 times the House opened impeachment proceedings for a U.S. official, only two of them were presidents and – as we addressed – neither of them was Nixon. The first president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson in 1868. Another president wouldn’t be impeached until 1998 when Bill Clinton was accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” In both cases, the Senate voted to acquit the sitting president. It’s not surprising that the conviction of a U.S. president is unheard of, as only eight federal judges have been removed from office following a Senate vote. And although full impeachment and conviction seems like a lost cause, that hasn’t prevented geberations of members of Congress from thinking about it. From Ronald Reagan onward, every president has inspired talk of impeachment within the House.