https://www.city-journal.org/trump-presidential-impeachment
More than a century passed between the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and the almost-impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974. Since then, the intervals have been getting shorter—a sort of Doppler effect. It was only 24 years after Nixon’s resignation that Bill Clinton’s case came before the House of Representatives, and only 21 years after that that the impeachment investigation of Donald Trump began.
It seems possible that in the manic accelerations of the twenty-first century, impeachment may soon become routine. The nation is at war with itself. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, Republicans might have tried to impeach her. Indeed, if impeachment becomes a regular tactic of the opposition, America will have informally adopted a quasi-parliamentary system of governance. Impeachment will amount to a chronic, slow-motion vote of no confidence, staged now and then in intervals between the quadrennial elections that the Constitution intended.
No matter what the outcome of an impeachment, the process itself would, among other things, ensure that nothing much would get done in the way of the public’s business. That would, in fact, be the goal—to paralyze an enemy administration by putting the incumbent through the wringer.
How would this serve the country? It would certainly be a quantum leap in partisan antagonism. In the past, Americans regarded impeachment as an extreme rarity, a sort of civic apocalypse. In the future, it might become merely another ritual of hardball politics.
I can think offhand of at least a half-dozen presidents who might have been impeached—but were not—for abuses of the public trust: I don’t mean that they necessarily should have been impeached, only that their enemies might have made a plausible case for it. Would Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus have been sufficient grounds? Could Woodrow Wilson have been impeached for ordering the racial segregation of workers in the Post Office and other federal departments? In the last months of his presidency, when he was incapacitated by a stroke, Wilson—or anyway, his wife Edith and his physician, Cary Grayson—concealed the facts of his grave medical condition from Congress and the American people. One way or another, he should have been removed from office. Franklin Roosevelt had a foxy way with the truth, and Republicans might have persuasively accused him of abuse of power in lying repeatedly—or anyway, in staging fancy misdirections—as he maneuvered America toward involvement in World War II.
