https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/04/trumps_true_crime_he_made_people_laugh_at_congress_141643.html
“Let’s hope some Democrats and Republicans will earn their way into a sequel to “Profiles in Courage” by standing against the naked power grab of Democrats who wanted to overturn an election and eliminate an “Unacceptable President.”
Since impeachment is a political rarity, it is not unexpected that analysts would seek out the few parallels from U.S. history to put in context the assault being waged against President Trump by the Democrats. It has been argued that Trump is not being afforded the same rights by the opposition party in Congress that were extended to his impeachment predecessors Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But, while significant, those are not the most relevant precedents.
To draw a more apt comparison to the political persecution of Trump, we need to go back to the first actual impeachment of a president, which happened in 1868, when Andrew Johnson was harassed by his Republican opponents in Congress, in part because he did not agree with their policies on Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War.
The meat of the impeachment hinged on Johnson’s rejection of the Tenure of Office Act, which added to the Senate’s constitutional power to confirm presidential appointments by also denying the president the right to fire Cabinet members once they had been confirmed. To modern sensibilities, this seems absurd and unworkable, and so too did it seem to Johnson. He fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln, and promptly found himself facing charges of committing an impeachable offense.
Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat who had been selected by Lincoln — the first Republican president — as his second-term running mate to symbolize the coming together of the nation as the Civil War approached its end. Most of the Republicans in Congress – they proudly called themselves “Radical” Republicans – did not share Lincoln’s confidence in Johnson, who was an unpolished populist in the same vein as Donald Trump. Moreover, they thought Johnson should never have become president in the first place, much like Democrats’ attitude toward Trump today. Lincoln wasn’t supposed to die. By removing Johnson from office, the Republicans were just restoring the natural order and disposing of someone they considered an accidental president.
Whether they had used the Tenure of Office Act specifically to entrap Johnson or not, it had that effect. Johnson believed that the new law was an unconstitutional abridgment of his authority, and so he ignored the law in order to challenge it. He knew that Congress was trying to neutralize him because he opposed the Republican plan for Reconstruction.
