Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Impeachment was on just about everybody’s mind last week as the House of Representatives’ hearings on the subject went live. But the idea of impeachment is likely misunderstood.
Some understand it to mean “kicked out of office.” Others see it as the trial about whether to kick someone out of office.
With that understanding, it can be confusing.
The U.S. Constitution says the House has the power to impeach, and the Senate has the right to try impeachments.
In 1787, when the Constitution was hammered together, “impeachment,” according to the definition in Samuel Johnson’s famous English dictionary of the time, is a “public accusation; charges preferred (that is, brought forward, my note).”
Under that definition, the roles of the House and Senate become clear. The House accuses and the Senate conducts a trial. Impeachment is equivalent to a grand-jury indictment.
That, then, is what the House was doing as of Friday — conducting public hearings that will end in a vote by the House on whether to impeach the president; that is, file charges that the Senate would try.
According to a House of Representatives history of impeachment, the delegates who forged the Constitution settled the question of impeachment before they decided on what the president should be able to do, as they invented a chief executive position that would not have the absolute power of a monarch.
In the final product, only 173 words of the unamended Constitution’s 4,543 words apply to impeachment.
Besides brief descriptions of the roles of the House and Senate, there is this brief description of impeachment in Article II, which deals with the executive branch: “The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Of those words, “high crimes and misdemeanors” have caused the most turmoil.
According to a recent Federalist Society essay on the phrase, in 1787 a law dictionary of the time defined “high crimes” as violations of written laws. Misdemeanors included breaches of trust such as acting outside authority, self-dealing, acting for one’s “own profit only,” and misappropriating funds.
After the final Constitution was signed in September 1787, the framers commissioned the “Federalist Papers,” designed to sell the new Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton, one of the key authors of these essays, devoted two of the papers to impeachment. In the first, he predicted that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or (unfavorable) to the accused.”
Impeachment proceedings will “enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other,” he added, and leave the threat that “the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
I will not address that last point before the House impeaches, if it does, and the Senate tries the case.
Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a semi-retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at: