Impeachment talk is now in the political air we breathe each day in Washington.
President Trump called it a “dirty, filthy, disgusting” word, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing her best to assuage far-left members of her caucus who are panting for it. At the same time, she is trying to avoid the political risk of conducting an obviously partisan impeachment inquiry during an election year.
Impeachment has always been a political act dressed in the clothing of a legal proceeding. But has it also always been partisan?
President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868 centered on his alleged violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Radical Republicans — yes, that was a real term once applicable, even if it isn’t today — worried that Johnson would follow Abraham Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies, which they regarded as excessively lenient. Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, was one of the Radical Republicans, and his colleagues wanted him to remain in office. Congress passed the tenure act over Johnson’s veto, and it required that the president seek Senate advice and consent before relieving or dismissing any Cabinet member.
The law was probably unconstitutional, and on Feb. 21, Johnson fired Stanton in defiance of it. The angry House passed 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson just three days later, with a vote of 126 to 47. But the president avoided removal from office when the Senate decided by a single vote against conviction.
Lyman Trumbull of Illinois was one Republican who refused to vote for Johnson’s removal. His reason? He thought the process was one-sided. In a speech on the floor of the Senate, he said, “Blinded by partisan zeal, with such an example before them, they will not scruple to remove out of the way any obstacle to the accomplishment of their purposes, and what then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution, so carefully devised and so vital to its perpetuity? They are all gone.”
Are you listening, madam speaker?
