In the debate over whether Donald Trump deserves impeachment, a curious partisan reversal has taken place. Trump’s opponents are suddenly constitutional originalists, seeking to ground their case for impeachment in 18th-century history and founding-era rhetoric. Meanwhile, his most persuasive defenders are more likely to invoke a kind of living constitutionalism, in which the limited, sporadic way that impeachment has been actually used over the centuries matters more than what the founders contemplated.

Thus the House Democrats’ brief for impeachment is studded with 18th-century quotes to prove that “high crimes and misdemeanors” covers all manner of corrupt uses of official power, easily encompassing Trump’s sordid behavior with Ukraine. And legal scholars have rushed to point out that in the English tradition the founders drew upon, the impeachment power was used for what the legal historian Frank O. Bowman III calls “a striking array of abuses of office,” not just a few specific crimes.

Skeptics of the impeachment push, meanwhile, have pointed to the striking absence of presidential impeachments across the Republic’s subsequent history. Did James Madison favor an expansive understanding of the impeachment clause? Maybe so, but as an editor of his papers pointed out in The Washington Post, as president, Madison engaged in a dodgy, Trumpian scheme to use State Department money to buy documents purporting to prove his Federalist opponents were conniving with London; the Federalists cried foul, but there wasn’t even the beginning of an impeachment proceeding.

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