Impeachment must not become routine

My record as a political forecaster is creditable, but I admit to one complete aberration. In 1996, I thought that, despite the incumbent’s overwhelming advantage in political skills, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas would narrowly defeat President Bill Clinton. (Clinton won 379 to 159 in the Electoral College. I was not even close.) My rationale was that there was already enough scandal whirling around the White House — Paula Jones, Whitewater — to continue the GOP’s momentum from the midterm sweep of Congress two years before and oust the president.

I was wrong, but I felt a tiny sense of vindication the following spring when the term “impeachment” was first brought into the open by Rep. Bob Barr. That proved I had seen a profound issue: no president had been impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868, and even Richard Nixon, regarded by presidential historians as the crook’s crook, had resigned in 1974 rather than face impeachment. That showed how grave a process it was.

Next month marks 25 years since the House of Representatives approved a resolution authorizing the Judiciary Committee to examine potential grounds for Clinton’s impeachment. Since then, however, impeachment has started to become a quotidian and partisan weapon. President Trump made history by being impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021, while the loose cannon that is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed articles of impeachment against President Biden the day after his inauguration. The notion was aired again after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy just launched an impeachment inquiry related to Biden’s relationship with his wayward son, Hunter.

This is symptomatic of a breakdown of faith in the political system. This breakdown has happened gradually, and some will point to Watergate and Nixon as the origin point, but the arrival of Donald Trump catalyzed the process. His banishment of truth and facts from any political importance was a transformation: it reduced the venerable institutions of the United States to mere context, the backdrop to an utterly transactional style of politics.

Under those circumstances — the declaration that no holds were barred, that winning was the only thing that mattered — impeachment becomes just another weapon. It is foolish, weak and frankly naïve to hold it in any special regard, an instrument for grave emergencies. Everything is an emergency, and yet everything is ephemeral. So if a party thinks it can gain advantage over its enemies by reaching for articles of impeachment, then it will do so, because that is what you do to win.

There is another factor. The U.S. is relatively unusual in having a head of state who is also the head of government (only around 40 other countries have this kind of arrangement, out of 195 states globally). This creates a tension: the head of state is to an extent symbolic, what Charles de Gaulle called l’esprit de la nation — the spirit of the nation — and is supposed to be above the political hurly-burly in a way the head of government cannot be. There has long been a widespread view that the president, in his role as head of state, deserves a degree of bipartisan respect and the acknowledgement of his authority as the nation’s duly elected chief magistrate.

Of course, several presidents have strained this obligation almost to breaking point: most would agree that Warren Harding and Nixon did so, while some would level the charge at Clinton. Trump normalized this state of affairs because he so clearly had no respect for any other constitutional norms or proprieties, which first became evident with his “birther” conspiracy theory campaign against President Barack Obama in 2011.

That set the pattern. During the 2016 election, Trump consistently made statements that were blatantly false; hinted that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be at risk of violence from supporters of the Second Amendment; gave sly credence to conspiracy theories; and, accusing Clinton of a smorgasbord of criminal offenses, led chants at his campaign rallies of “Lock her up!” The culmination of this behavior was, of course, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, a stance he maintains to this day despite no evidence of significant voting irregularities.

In that political context, in which not even the rules of the game are mutually agreed upon, impeachment loses its gravity, becoming just another partisan process, its only differentiation that Article I of the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to secure a conviction. Anyone who studies British constitutional practice knows that there are some sanctions that derive force from their lack of use, potent because they remain theoretical. So it was until 30 years ago with impeachment, the very possibility of which had forced the nation’s only presidential resignation.

My predictions have been wrong in the past, but it would be a brave forecast that there will be any such respect for constitutional and institutional order a decade from now.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs. He was senior official in the UK House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.