If the Democrats win the House in November, they’ll come under pressure to impeach President Trump. Even if Robert Mueller fails to turn up some astounding surprise, many Democrats want to impeach Mr. Trump because they simply don’t like him. Since the Constitution specifies that a president can be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” such a move would mean Democrats consider being disliked by the House majority to be a disqualifying crime.
That is precisely what many members of Congress thought 150 years ago this week, at the conclusion of the first impeachment of a sitting president, Andrew Johnson. The 17th president’s impeachment offers the important lesson that although the mechanism for impeachment is easy, the subsequent process of trial, conviction and removal from office is not. A failure at that stage of the process covers everybody with embarrassment—impeachers and impeached alike.
The problem with impeachment began at the beginning, during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Delegates were uneasy about the idea of concentrating all executive powers in the hands of the president. What, James Madison asked, was to protect “the Community against the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate”? But although they agreed the president must be checked, the delegates were unsure about which branch of government ought to bell the cat. Congress? The judiciary? That, objected South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, would effectively destroy the president’s independence, while New York’s Rufus King suggested it would dump the principle that “the three great departments of Government should be separate and independent.”
The solution was to make “all civil Officers of the United States” liable to impeachment for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the founders divided the process between the House, which would move the impeachment articles, and the Senate, which would conduct the trial to convict. When the subject was the president, the chief justice would preside. What’s more, the Senate would have to summon a supermajority of two-thirds for a conviction. It would take some serious provocation to make impeachment look worth the effort.
That, however, is just what Andrew Johnson provided. After Lincoln’s assassination, he inherited the presidency without any clear public mandate. The Civil War had just come to its exhausted close, and as a Southerner, Johnson imagined that the best solution was to let bygones be bygones and accept the South back into the Union as quickly as possible. His only requirement was that the Southern states eliminate slavery, the war’s principal cause.
That, however, wasn’t enough to suit Congress, where Lincoln’s Republican Party held ample majorities in both houses. They balked at Johnson’s easy-pass approach and began enacting legislation to assert control over the reconstruction process. Thus came the 1866 Civil Rights Act to protect freed slaves, the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide economic assistance, and the Tenure of Office Act to protect Republican officeholders from dismissal. Johnson vetoed them all, but Congress overrode him.
In February 1868, Johnson threw down the glove by defying the Tenure of Office Act and attempting to fire War Secretary Edwin Stanton. Disgruntled Republicans had already made two attempts to impeach Johnson, but his direct violation of the statute, which he thought unconstitutional, tipped the scales against him in the House, which duly impeached him on Feb. 24.
But then the muddle of the impeachment process began to work in Johnson’s favor. Removal would require convicting him of “high Crimes” or “Misdemeanors,” but was that really a fitting description for a personnel dispute? It didn’t help that the seven House impeachment managers who trooped over to the Senate chamber to conduct the prosecution mishandled almost every aspect of their case. By the time a preliminary vote was taken on the first of 11 impeachment articles, Johnson’s opponents failed to earn the necessary two-thirds support. When a second vote followed on two other articles May 26, it fell short again. Johnson was saved.
Johnson spent his last nine months in office as the lamest of lame-duck presidents. But impeachment had conferred no ribbons on the impeachers. Three of the managers were later compromised by corruption charges, and two others left their seats at the end of the term. Charged with wiping mud off the presidency, they had only wiped it all over themselves. Congress learned the same lesson 130 years later with the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Pinckney and King might have been right in 1787. Americans prefer to choose their presidents with elections, and whenever impeachment is used in an attempt to nullify those choices, the results aren’t happy for anyone. That was true in 1868, and as both Andrew Johnson and his accusers might warn us, it remains true after a century and a half.
Mr. Guelzo is a visiting professor in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
Appeared in the May 26, 2018, print edition.