On the Course of Impeachment

In the days ahead, one thing is certain. Any decision about whether to impeach or remove the sitting president will not favor any person, any party, or any nation. Certainly not ours. One side may believe they have the facts, the rights, and the constitutional responsibility to take this action, while the other may produce merchandise, ads, and rhetoric to argue the whole thing is a sham. Either way, no one wins, not this year or next year, not as a result of this present course.

But let’s be honest. The course itself is not without warrant, or precedent.

The steps and the levers that brought us into a conversation about impeachment are a testament of something else, something far more fundamental, that as a nation, as voters, we have not, of late, elected someone we trust. Within the lines of political loyalty, sure. But outside those lines, the rest of us now ache for stability, for the kind of steady hand we expect from our mothers, our fathers, our pastors, our teachers, our police captains, our fire chiefs, our bosses, our mayors, our governors, and of course, our presidents, leaders tasked with caring for our general well-being, regardless of how we feel about them. Even those wedded to their political loyalties must concede that aside from a few people huddled in the captain’s quarters, our nation is presently restless, and uncertain, and troubled, none of which bodes well on a listing, tilting ship.

The United States has always been rooted in a revolt against singularity of power, against the notion that one man, one king should hold all the cards and play them in a game against a mass of people with none. The colonists once argued that even though the crown was still beloved by some, it had violated the public trust of the many. And the Declaration of Independence was their way of stating a new American ideal, one in which the people would reign supreme, not just through elections, but through the power of their voices, at all times, in every way, to speak out against perceived injustices, whenever they felt compelled to exercise that right.

For a short time, our Founders went to the opposite extreme with their Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), attempting to run a country without an executive, in turn forcing the implementation of a better system, a Constitutional system, one in which there was, indeed, an executive, to be the face of the nation, but an executive who was still held accountable to the legislature, the legislature being held accountable to the judiciary, and the judiciary being appointed by the executive and ultimately approved by the legislature. These were, understandably, three co-equal branches of government, each one being subject, ultimately, to the people and to each other.

When it came to the methods our legislature might use to hold the executive accountable, the Founders bowed to the wisdom of other states, already managing constitutions of their own. They conceded that failures in office were not sufficient to warrant impeachment, nor personal flaws or detestable manners. But if there was, more specifically, a negligence of the public trust (oath of office), a violation in the process of justice (courts and hearings and testimonies), or a brazen abuse of power (profiting from or hindering the progress of a foreign nation or domestic enterprises), then these fell under the purview of the House, bringing into question that individual’s fitness for office, regardless of an election.

Partisan as they were, these were the same factors that brought Clinton and Nixon to the brink of impeachment and resignation. Through words and actions, both leaders were, in the end, the cause of their own impeachments, just as our current president has never been one to hold his tongue or resist the impulses of consequence. The only exceptional case of impeachment is the one we know the least about.

Two summers ago, ahead of our trip to the Tennessee mountains, I read through a 450-page biography of Andrew Johnson, a native of Greenville, a former governor of the state, and the first American president to face impeachment. Most of us only think of Johnson when we Google “which presidents have been impeached,” but the reality is, Johnson wasn’t supposed to be there, not in the presidency, that is. For most of the Civil War (like, 95% of it), Hannibal Hamlin was our forgotten Vice President, hailing from the highest state of Maine and favoring the restorative views of President Lincoln. But during the Election of 1864, Lincoln traded Hamlin for Johnson in order to earn points with the still warring South. When Lincoln was killed just a few weeks into his second term, Johnson became the president no one knew, no one trusted, and no one wanted.

Without question, Johnson was a troublemaker, and had been for decades, someone whose enemies in the local media accused him of being an “infidel, a demagogue, an unprincipled ingrate, and a convicted liar.” And truth be told, his pacifying, disturbing response to the post-war South, as an American President, paved way for Jim Crow laws and 100 years of segregation. One could even argue that Johnson was indirectly at fault for every lynching, every beating, every abuse, every ounce of oppression that went ignored across every southern state for decades to come.

But that wasn’t why the House impeached him.

Instead, fearing the new president would remove cabinet members from Lincoln’s original staff, Congress passed a law saying he simply couldn’t do that, a law that was overturned just a few years later, because it illegally tied the hands of a new president to the decisions of his predecessor. At the time the law went through Congress, however, Johnson vetoed it, forcing Congress to pass it again, over and above his veto. Almost three years into his term, Johnson finally got fed up and fired a member of Lincoln’s cabinet anyhow. Alas, the House voted for his impeachment, then tacked on a few other shoddy articles of nonsense. In a nutshell, the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson was a hatchet job.

Whether Andrew Johnson was unfairly impeached or not, whether he was a detestable human being or not, I still drove out to see his home town and his grave in 2018, learning almost immediately that banks and shops and law firms had been named after the favorite son of Greenville, even to the point of erecting a powerful monument at the site of his burial (see the image attached). In other words, the nation and its people moved on.

Whether Donald Trump is impeached or removed from office, whether he is loved or loathed in the present day or the years to come, impeachment will only be a marker for the history books, to note the actions that spawned a fight over accountability. But impeachment cannot and will not calm the waves that make us ill.

For that, we have to be far more honest, more real, more open about our present course than we have been up to this point.