https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/how-impeachment-works/
Lessons from the failed Republican effort to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency
Impeachment chatter is suddenly in vogue. It was strictly déclassé during the Obama years. To hear congressional Republicans tell it, the Clinton fiasco of the late Nineties proved both that the Constitution’s procedure for removing corrupt presidents is futile and that invoking it guarantees political carnage for the accusers.
Today’s Democrats, as the saying goes, never got the memo. Or perhaps they have known all along that their counterparts learned precisely the wrong lessons from President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Now that the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump is a realistic contingency, though, getting those lessons right is vital.
The problem with Clinton’s impeachment was not the impeachment process itself. It is difficult by design, as it must be for stability’s sake. But it is hardly obsolete. It did, after all, drive a president from office — Richard M. Nixon, who resigned on the cusp of impeachment — just 25 years before articles of impeachment were filed against Clinton.
No, the problems were twofold. First was the nature of the impeachable offenses. It is not the case, as is commonly assumed, that they were salacious, but that they were remote from the core duties of the presidency. Second was the mulish insistence on pursuing impeachment when the public was clearly opposed to it. An impeachment effort cannot succeed without the tireless building of a political case in favor of removal, a case that achieves a critical mass of public support before impeachment is sought.
Hindsight is always 20/20, of course. I was still a Justice Department prosecutor during most of Bill Clinton’s second term as president, not a journalist doing public commentary. But I favored his impeachment, just as most Republicans and conservatives did. It is easy to see now that the episode has had an enduring, poisonous effect on our politics. Still, 20 years later, with a Republican president in office, it seems a wee bit self-serving to pronounce, finally, that we were wrong.
In truth, I have not waited 20 years. Clinton’s impeachment was a focus of my 2014 book Faithless Execution. At the time, the backstretch of the Obama presidency, the political class and most of the public were not of a mind to ponder the Constitution’s ultimate remedy for presidential misconduct and overreach.
