Time, and ’empescher’
The term impeachment runs far back in time, before this country was discovered and before democracy was a even gleam in any ruler’s eye. It runs to the Middle Ages, when brutal French conquerors tried to beat a manageable form of government into the stubborn, conquered English.
Norman-Angevin kings, often absent from their English dominion, found that if they gave their English subordinates a sense of participation, government became more manageable.
That participation was institutionalized in a Parliament of Lords and Commons. When officers of the king ran contrary to the wishes of Parliament, or when they did not act at all, Parliament might “impeach” those officers. The term comes from the old French, “empescher” – to seize, or to stop, or apprehend an officer of the King on order of Parliament .
Centuries later, John Doar recounted part of this history during the 1974 impeachment inquiry into Watergate that led to President Nixon’s resignation. Doar, chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, led a large staff of attorneys who were to inform the committee, find facts and present evidence that would serve the panel’s deliberations. This included a lot of history.
The first impeachment example cited by Doar’s staff involved the case against the Chancellor of Richard II, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, in 1386. The Earl was impeached because he had failed to act as he had promised Parliament. The details aren’t relevant here, and other English impeachments followed. By the time of Oliver Cromwell and the religious wars at least 100 impeachments were passed between 1620 and 1640, according to Doar’s report.
Why the long history? Doar sought to run a clear line through these earliest impeachments. They were not necessarily criminal trials, but a way to target the men around a King, to squeeze the sovereign by throttling his servants. A man found guilty by impeachment, such as the Earl of Stafford, was beheaded. Charles I of England lost his head in1649 because the penalty for wrongdoing against the state applied to royalty as well. Remember that a failure to act was also an impeachable offense. If Parliament had failed to behead a guilty king, their heads would roll instead.
Writers of the U.S. Constitution wanted to avoid this guillotine remedy for a president or other high officials found guilty of criminal behavior. The American founders had suffered the tyranny of George III and believed the chief executive of a new United States should be under some kind of control. They settled on the ultimate check, removal from office, not by beheading but by impeachment and trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
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The United States would have a written Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, and taking force in 1789, accepted as “the supreme law of the land “. It limits the kinds of laws that state and federal legislatures may enact. These laws can be challenged as unconstitutional if they are seen to violate “basic law”.
The Constitution also sets out, as law, the frame of the federal government, its branches – legislative, executive and judicial – and their separate powers. In only general terms it provides for punishment for a President found guilty of exceeding his powers. Among the obvious crimes are bribery, punishable by law, and treason, a constitutional violation. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is at once vague and precise, a definition left to circumstance and to the skills and inclinations of prosecutors.
In Doar’s case in 1974, evidence of a statutory crime – obstruction of justice and more, confirmed on the infamous White House tapes – overtook the initial wrangling and rumination among members of the Judiciary Committee about “misdemeanors.”
Abuse of power, another focus of the committee, was a violation of basic law, but the issue would be defined after the facts were established.
Under normal procedure and circumstance, as in 1974, the Judiciary Committee deliberates, then decides whether to pass articles of impeachment to the full House. If the House votes the articles up, they move to the Senate for high trial.
In late July, 1974, the Committee approved and sent to the House three articles of impeachment against President Nixon: obstruction of justice, misuse of power, and contempt of Congress.
Nixon, facing almost certain impeachment by the House , a Senate trial and conviction and removal from office, resigned on August 9, 1974, before the House could act. Nixon was the first American president to resign. A month later, on September 8, he was issued a full pardon by his vice president and successor, Gerald Ford.
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