Feb. 13, 2024, 5:34 p.m. ET
Feb. 13, 2024, 5:34 p.m. ET
News analysis
Votes displayed in the House of Representatives during the second impeachment vote against President Donald Trump in January 2021.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
If the House impeaches Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, it would be the first time in American history that a sitting Cabinet official is impeached. But Mr. Mayorkas is not that lonely.
Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against his boss, President Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director. They threatened them against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
In fact, the threat of impeachment has become a favorite Republican pastime after former President Donald J. Trump urged his allies to seek revenge for his own two impeachment trials during his term. The chances that Mr. Mayorkas, let alone Mr. Biden, will ever be convicted in the Senate without a shocking revelation appear to be almost zero, and the others do not even appear to be in serious danger of being formally impeached by the House become.
But impeachment, once considered perhaps the most serious fight against corruption and abuse of power and pioneered by the Founding Fathers, now risks becoming a dead letter to the Constitution, just another weapon in today’s bitter partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals have made clear that a president can be assured of remaining in office, no matter how serious his misdeeds, as long as his party sticks with him, and the Biden-era impeachment effort for a serious crime was written off as just more politics.
“Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious executive branch accountability mechanism,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is consistent with the deterioration of norms in Washington institutions and the ever-increasing weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.”
When drafting the Constitution, the framers chose to include an impeachment clause to prevent the despotism that Americans had just freed themselves from in the Revolution. First, they decided that presidents and other officials could be impeached with a majority in the House of Representatives and convicted of “treason or bribery” with a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
George Mason thought this was too limited and suggested adding “maladministration” as a punishable offense, i.e. incompetence. But James Madison objected, finding it too broad and arguing that it would subject the president to the whims of the Senate. Mason backed down, but then suggested “or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as an alternative.
It was elegant, but the designers didn’t really define it. Alexander Hamilton made it clear that the term meant crimes that “concern principally injuries directly inflicted upon society itself” – in other words, not every ancient crime would be punishable, but only those which constituted an offense against the people or represented the system.
It should be rare and it was for decades. Only 21 times has the House voted to impeach a government official, and only eight times has the Senate convicted and removed them from office, all judges who otherwise served life terms. The only other Cabinet official impeached, William Belknap, the corrupt Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant, resigned in tears just minutes before the House took up his case in 1876, but lawmakers voted anyway for accusing him.
It was so rare that no president was impeached until President Andrew Johnson was one vote away from being convicted in the Senate in 1868. It took 130 years for another impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, who was also acquitted, and only 21 years passed between the second and third impeachment trials of Mr. Trump.
Just over a year passed between the third and fourth, when Mr. Trump was impeached a second time. If the House of Representatives impeaches Mr Biden, there will have been three articles of impeachment against the president in five years – more than in the previous 230 years of the republic combined.
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2024-02-13 22:38:48
www.nytimes.com