In one of his last and desperate attempts to stay in office, the former speaker (president) of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, announced the opening of an investigation to determine whether proceedings were opened to prosecute and remove from office (impeachment). to President Joe Biden for alleged enrichment derived from his son Hunter’s businesses. The episode reflects not only the desperation of the unfortunate Californian congressman, but also the evident devaluation of what should be a transcendental mechanism in the American legal and constitutional framework.
In fact, this procedure has only been launched on just half a dozen occasions throughout the almost two and a half centuries of the republic’s existence and has never concluded with the removal of the president.
Very succinctly, the mechanism works as follows. The House of Representatives votes to determine whether there are generic grounds for impeachment and one or more committees of that body draft the corresponding charges, which must be approved by the House. From there we move on to the trial, with the Senate established as a court, presided over by the president of the Supreme Court. At the end of the trial, the Senate votes and a majority of more than two-thirds is needed – currently 67 senators would be needed – to remove the tenant from the White House.
The first time it was invoked was in 1868 against President Andrew Johnson, who had come to office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Accused of abuse of power for having expelled from the cabinet the Minister of War that he had inherited from Lincoln and in a very tense political climate after the end of the Civil War, Johnson escaped dismissal by a single vote.
Apparently more serious were the charges formulated more than a hundred years later – spring 1974 – against Richard Nixon, obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress, all of them related to the so-called Watergate scandal and validated by the House. Knowing that he did not have enough votes in the Senate to save himself, Nixon opted for his resignation in August of that same year.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 was starkly political. No one doubts that he lied when he denied an improper relationship – his words, his euphemism – with the intern Monica Lewinsky, but from there to the charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power of which he was accused and for which he was judged half a stretch, which a qualified majority in the Senate refused to travel.
Donald Trump holds the dubious honor of having been the only president in history to undergo not one, but two procedures of this nature. The first, ironically, was on the occasion of his conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, conditioning aid to Ukraine on the discovery of garbage that he could use against the then candidate Joe Biden. The second, of somewhat dubious constitutionality since the trial concluded when his term had already ended, was for having allegedly contributed to the riot that culminated in the invasion of Congress in January 2021. In both cases, he was acquitted, with the Senate respecting voting discipline with one exception (it was Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, who broke it).
The extraordinary political polarization that the country is experiencing and the closeness of the electoral results make it extremely difficult for any of the two major parties in the Senate to have in the Senate the 67 votes necessary to oust a sitting president in the foreseeable future, regardless of the seriousness of the charges brought against him. It was probably not what the founding fathers had in mind when they referred to high crimes and misdemeanors as reasons that would justify removing a president from office.