To date, 19 officials, including judges, cabinet members, senators, and presidents, have been impeached and stood trial. The crimes these individuals have been charged with range from perjury to conspiracy to intoxication on the bench. It is important to note that impeachment is not the actual removal from office, but merely the process to remove an official. Currently, members of the House of Representatives are investigating President Trump to determine if he should be impeached.
Constitution Handout A. Then have them answer the following questions. Directions: Assign students to research an impeachment case from U. You can find a full list of individuals impeached here. Students should use the following questions to guide their research. This week, our question is: Should the impeachment clause of the Constitution stay broadly written and applied? Upcoming Events Explore our upcoming webinars, events and programs.
View All Events. It is a remedy for abuses of public office. But the line between general unfitness and abuse of office can be blurry.
The Senate was not anxious to say that Pickering had committed a crime, but neither was it willing to leave him on the bench. While the Pickering case was idiosyncratic and awkward, it raised issues that remain unresolved about the scope of the impeachment power.
Can a government official be impeached and convicted for innocent mistakes, or must they have bad intentions? Can private misdeeds justify an impeachment, or must the actions in question be connected to the conduct of the office that an individual holds? While still serving as a member of the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford once said that impeachable offenses are whatever a majority of the House considered them to be.
The burden is on those who want to bring impeachment charges to persuade a majority of the members of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the members of the Senate that an act is so serious as to justify removing an individual from office.
The impeachment power is a tool that most members of Congress are unwilling to use if it can be avoided, but they have also wanted to preserve it as a tool that is flexible enough to be used in any exceptional circumstances that might arise. The impeachment power exists at the far margins of American constitutionalism. The Founders sought to create three branches of government, each independent of the others and enmeshed in a system of checks and balances.
They thought that if government power collapsed into a single set of officials, civil liberty and political effectiveness would be compromised.
Each branch of government was armed with its own set of powers and responsibilities and given sufficient tenure and resources to be able to act on its own judgment. But the desire for independence had to be balanced against a concern with accountability.
Government officials needed to be independent enough to be able to act in the public interest, but not so independent as to be able to exercise unchecked power.
When the Founders wanted to ensure accountability, they mostly relied on elections and the voters to hold government officials responsible for their actions.
But for cases in which abusive behavior could not be tolerated until the next election, they provided for the possibility of impeachment and removal. That power they were only willing to entrust to the most democratic branch of the government, the legislature.
If the impeachment power is going to serve its purpose, it needs to be flexible. There are risks associated with either a narrow or broad reading of impeachable offenses. A narrow reading of the Clause risks making the impeachment power inflexible and unable to respond to unanticipated bad behavior on the part of government officials.
A broad reading of the Clause risks creating a partisan weapon that can be used by legislators to undermine the independence of other government officials. If the examples of treason and bribery are taken to be characteristic of the full scope of impeachable offenses, then government officials might only be removable if they commit criminal acts involving their public office.
That is an important class of misdeeds, but it seems unlikely that it would capture the full range of behavior that might put the public good in immediate jeopardy. Even some instances of non-criminal misbehavior by a high government official might be regarded as too intolerable to allow them to continue to exercise their public responsibilities. The broader the category of impeachable offenses is understood to be the easier it is for mere political disagreements to become grounds for impeachment investigations.
It is all too common for partisans to believe that their political foes are not just wrong but dangerously wrong, not just mistaken but willfully mistaken, not just erroneous but abusive. If the impeachment power is used to settle political scores, then the independence of the separate branches of government will be undermined. If routine impeachments became a tool for overcoming policy disputes and political obstructions, then political power would gradually be centralized in Congress, with the judiciary and the executive reduced to being little more than extensions of the legislative will.
The Constitution was not designed to have Presidents and judges sit only at the pleasure of the Congress. In practice, three factors have discouraged Congress from abusing the impeachment power. First, the House and the Senate have built up precedents over time that give some substantive content to the scope of impeachable offenses. Impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been removed from office. Chicago Tribune.
Parliament U. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The three branches of the U. According to the doctrine of separation of powers, the U. Constitution distributed the power of the federal government among these three branches, and built a system of checks and The system of checks and balances in government was developed to ensure that no one branch of government would become too powerful.
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The U. Constitution gives the president the power to veto, or reject, legislation that has been passed by Congress. What Does Veto The billionaire businessman ran as a Republican and scored an upset victory over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the The race for the U.
Donald Trump became the fifth president to win despite losing the popular vote in , joining the ranks of An executive order is an official directive from the U. Throughout history, executive orders have been one way that the power of the president and the executive branch of government has expanded—to Departing from the monarchical tradition of Britain, the founding fathers of the United States created a system in which the American people had the power and responsibility to select their leader.
Article II, Section 1 of the U. Constitution establishes the Executive Branch of Only three U. One of those presidents, Donald Trump, was impeached twice during his single term.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Article 2 of the Constitution After much debate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the attendees—among them George Washington , Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin —approved the concept behind the impeachment of government officials.
How the Impeachment Process Works Generally, the first step in the impeachment process in the House of Representatives is to hold a formal inquiry into whether or not there are grounds for impeachment.
Senate Trial Follows House Impeachment Vote The Senate then acts as courtroom, jury and judge, except in presidential impeachment trials, during which the chief justice of the U. Presidents Who Faced Impeachment. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Richard Nixon's Impeachment Investigation. The Executive Branch. Senate Investigates Teamsters Union.
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