Impeachment

The House of Representatives has one judicial power. After a careful investigation, the House can accuse federal officials (including the President) of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors [offences]”. This rarely used process is called impeachment. The impeachment charge is brought by a majority vote of the House of Representatives. An impeachment action by the House is similar to the indictment by a grand jury in a criminal case. It means only that sufficient evidence exists to justify prosecution of the accused. The trial itself takes place in the Senate. Only four impeached officials, all federal judges, have been convicted.

Although legally the term “impeachment” applies only to the indictment, in popular usage it embraces also the trial of the accused, conducted by the higher branch of a legislature.

Under the provisions of the US Constitution the House indicts, the Senate tries, and the chief justice of the United States presides over the inquiry in case of impeachment of the president. Once the House has voted an impeachment, it then selects members (managers) to present the case before the Senate. A two-thirds vote of the senators present is required to convict. Punishment is limited to removal from office. Disqualification from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States” may follow and requires only a majority vote.

As the US Constitution doesn’t clearly explain what “other high crimes and misdemeanors” are, these provisions have proved a fertile source of vexing questions. Partly because of these ambiguities, but chiefly because the trial ties up the Senate for as much as six weeks, impeachment has taken place infrequently at the national level.

Three presidents so far have faced impeachment. The first was Andrew Johnson who succeeded following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Johnson was accused of interfering with the social and racial revolution that the North tried to impose on the South after the Civil War. Republicans were determined to remove the president, three votes were taken and finally Johnson was acquitted.

Richard Nixon, another Republican, was the second president threatened by impeachment, in 1974. Nixon was accused of subverting the laws and the Constitution by setting up a secret and illegal organization to spy on the opposition – and then covering up the crime when his operatives were caught during the 1972 election campaign burgling the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington. Nixon resigned before the House could vote. It was clear by then that he would lose in both houses.

Bill Clinton will go down in history as the president who had an affair with a 22-year-old girl in his office – and lied about it under oath.

In an attempt to shield himself from Paula Jones’s^* sexual harassment lawsuit and Monica Lewinsky’s revelations President Bill Clinton faced very serious charges of perjury (denying under oath that he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky) and obstruction of justice.

On January 7, 1999 his case went on trial before the Senate. The House Managers (the representatives acting as prosecutors on the Senate floor) failed to gain a two-thirds vote necessary for conviction and the president was acquitted. Only 45 Senators found the President guilty of perjury and 50 Senators considered him guilty of obstruction of justice. The President himself admitted having an inappropriate intimate relationship with the former White House intern, but he maintained that his comments had been “legally accurate” and that he had not committed perjury. Political analysts observed negative and positive results of this impeachment fever. According to them, the one really bad result of all this would be if the Americans made a habit of it, impeaching a president every time the other party (the Republican Party) controlled the Congress.