If you’ve been awake the last few days, you’ve probably heard the word impeachment so many times you’re sick of it. I’m pretty sure I know what impeachment means and have a fairly good understanding of how it works. But after listening to the President lately, I thought maybe I’m wrong, or something changed over they years without me knowing about it.
Turns out that wasn’t the case — it appears to be what I thought it was and it works the way I remember it being described to me in various government/civics courses over the years.
Basically, impeach means to charge a public official formally with misconduct in office. The word evolved from the Latin word “impedicare” that means to fetter, to fix shackles on the feet; to hinder. It later evolved into empechier (Old French) and then into the Middle English empechen, meaning to physically hinder something as well as to bring a formal accusation.
When someone is impeached, testimonial evidence presented is commonly understood to refer not to simply charging the official with misconduct, but to actually removing the official from office. Since removal from office is typically the goal of impeachment, this interpretation is understandable, but not legally accurate. But nonetheless, the “remove” sense is what many people have in mind when they think or talk about impeaching an official.
In our government, impeachment (bringing charges against) the President originates in the House of Representatives. Removal from office can only be accomplished after the charges are tried in the Senate.
Only two presidents have faced an impeachment trial — both of them Democrats and both of them were acquitted. The first was Andrew Johnson, in 1868, acquitted by one vote of violation of the previous years’s Tenure of Office Act. The second was Bill Clinton, in 1998, acquitted by a much larger margin of perjury and obstructing justice in relation to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
It’s interesting to note that the term impeachment was written into the U.S. Constitution at the insistence of Benjamin Franklin — he feared that the alternative to the legal removal of a corrupt official would be assassination….
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