Grounds for Impeachment?
"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." - Article II, Section 4, US Constitution.
"[He has made] false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States." - Article I of Impeachment of Richard Nixon.
Judges are occasionally impeached, but the last time a president was impeached was Andrew Johnson well over a hundred years ago. Johnson's impeachment arose over a political disagreement between the Radical Republicans on how severely to treat the South during Reconstruction. Ostensibly, Johnson was impeached for dismissing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson inadvertently aided his political enemies by his arrogant and truculent attitude. Conviction in the Senate was averted by a courageous single vote cast by a Republican Senator from Kansas, Edmund Ross. Ross was a subject of one of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. Today Ross, who may have prevented grave damage to constitutional government, lies in an obscure grave identifying the occupant as "the man who saved a President."
In 1973, one year before Nixon's resignation, the notion of another presidential impeachment was a distant one, but one that appeared to be rising over the horizon. To put the entire process in perspective, the House of Representatives commissioned a report to explore the historical nature of impeachment and to determine appropriate grounds for impeachment. A copy of the report can be found at the web site of Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren on California.
The report explains that the terms "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" first appeared in 1450 in an impeachment proceeding against William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk. De la Pole was accused of "procuring offices for persons who were unfit, and unworthy of them" and "squandering away the public treasure." Since that time, the phrase "high Crimes and Misdemeanors," says the report, has been commonly associated with impeachment. The term "misdemeanor" did not mean minor crime as it does today, but rather significant misconduct (i.e., mis-demeanor).
During the Constitutional Convention, the framers wrestled with balancing Presidential accountably against Congressional dominance of the chief executive. The framers did not want to make the President subject to the whims of Congress, yet they also wanted to avoid creating a monarch. Removal from office for "maladministration," suggested by George Mason, seemed too low a threshold. Benjamin Franklin suggested that President should be removed for being "obnoxious," an even lower threshold than "maladministation." One shudders at the thought of how common impeachments would be if this were the standard. The framers finally adopted the "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" terminology they inherited from English law.
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