VOX – President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey has raised questions about whether he was trying to obstruct an investigation into his campaign and associates. And this, not even four months into Trump’s term, has led to chatter about impeachment — the process by which a president can be charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and removed from office if he is convicted of those charges.
For the moment, this chatter is just that. It’s quite difficult to impeach, convict, and remove a president from office — so much so that’s it’s never happened in US history. (Two presidents have been impeached but acquitted; another resigned to avoid near-certain impeachment.) So far, we are not even remotely close to this politically charged process getting started for Trump, let alone actually happening.
But if you’re interested in understanding how impeachment works, the important thing to know is that while it looks and feels a whole lot like a legal or judicial process, in practice it is dominated by politics from start to finish.
That’s because, rather than being run by any courts, impeachment and any ensuing presidential trial are carried out by the House of Representatives and the Senate, which are partisan bodies.
Now, if a sitting president of the United States stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shot a random person in broad daylight, and was caught with a smoking gun, it’s probably a safe bet that Congress would vote to impeach him, convict him, and remove him from office, despite their partisanship. (Probably.)
But most political scandals are not so indisputable, damning, or well-documented as that. And on any matter where there is some sort of plausible deniability for the president, his political allies will have very strong incentive to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if it means twisting themselves into knots.
So as long as Republicans control Congress, there will be a very high bar indeed for any effort to impeach Trump to gain traction — some incredibly damning evidence of some indisputably serious crime would likely have to emerge. And even if Democrats retake the House, they’d still need to come up with a case strong enough to win two-thirds of the Senate to actually convict him. Unless a party has enormous partisan majorities, a partisan impeachment effort is doomed to fail.
What is impeachment?
The term “impeachment” itself dates back centuries in England, where it was “a device for prosecuting great lords and high officials who were beyond the reach of the law courts,” as David Stewart writes in Impeached, a book about President Andrew Johnson’s trial.
But in the US context, the framers of the Constitution set up the impeachment process to be a way Congress can remove the president from power.
First, the House of Representatives has the power to impeach the president. A simple majority is necessary for an article of impeachment to be approved (each article lays out a charge against the president).
Then the process moves to the Senate, where a trial will be held, with the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding.
Finally, and crucially, it takes a two-thirds vote from the Senate to actually convict a president on any count. Conviction on any count would then remove the president from office and put the vice president in power.
Note that two-thirds of the Senate — 67 votes — is a very high threshold that’s almost never achieved on any matter that’s remotely partisan. The framers did not make it easy for Congress to remove a democratically elected president from power.
What can the president actually be impeached for?
The Constitution specifies two specific crimes — treason and bribery — that could merit impeachment and removal from office. In addition to that, it mentions a vaguer, broader category of “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
That’s all we get, and what, exactly, that last category entails has been the subject of a great deal of debate through US history. When Gerald Ford was House minority leader, he said, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history” — though he said this when he was trying to impeach a Supreme Court justice, not a president.
