James Monroe had high hopes for the power of impeachment. It was, he wrote in the eighteen-twenties, “the main spring of the great machine of government…. If preserved in full vigor and exercised with perfect integrity, every branch will perform its duty.” On July 27, 1974—forty years ago this Sunday—the House Judiciary Committee showed more than a little of that vigor and integrity when it voted, by a substantial bipartisan majority, for the first of three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. Peter W. Rodino, Jr., a New Jersey Democrat who served as chairman, had opened the proceedings with a grave benediction: “I pray that we will each act with the wisdom that compels us in the end to be but decent men who seek only the truth. Let us be clear about this. No official, no concerned citizen, no representative, no member of this committee welcomes an impeachment proceeding.”

Yet some very concerned citizens would welcome one today, and eagerly. As we approach August 8th, the anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, impeachment is enjoying a vogue on the right. A tool that was used, in 1974, to safeguard our system of self-rule, and then, in 1998, to help turn a relationship with an intern into a political crisis, is being brandished, in 2014, as one more weapon in the war on government. “Impeach Obama” placards have been a mainstay at Tea Party rallies since at least 2010, but the manufacture of impeachment petitions and other appeals has become, of late, enough of a growth industry that Sarah Palin is looking to take it over. An op-ed at Breitbart.com was her opening bid; in it, she declared that President Obama’s “unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.’ ”

The Spanish-speaking wife in this scenario is you, America. And although the former governor is a bit vague about the other straws, each one an “impeachable offense,” other advocates have that covered. TeaParty.org, in its bill of particulars against the President, lists ten high crimes and misdemeanors—from Benghazi to illegal wiretapping to the “purposeful” sacrifice of Navy Seals in Afghanistan—while promising that “this petition has only begun to brush the surface.” Another right-wing site lists “100 reasons to impeach Barack Obama,” and even this is probably an act of restraint. A group called Renew America, in its appeal to impeach Obama, “the anti-American, Marxist fiend,” charges the President with a “hell-born plan to destroy our nation as founded,” which has absolutely got to be unconstitutional.

The G.O.P. has a solid chance of winning control of the Senate this November, something that leading members of the Party are not keen to squander by framing the election in the Tea Party’s terms—as a campaign for an “impeachment Congress.” (This being one of the few propositions that can make you look at the current Congress and say, “it could be worse.”) The memory of the G.O.P.’s historic losses in the 1998 midterm elections in the midst of the Clinton impeachment fight is still fresh.(After the House voted its bill of impeachment, Clinton was acquitted in the subsequent Senate trial.) The Party’s pragmatists agree with Senator John McCain that “there are not the votes” in the Congress to remove Obama from office. Pat Buchanan calls impeachment “a bridge too far”; to the Wall Street Journal, it’s a “delusion.” This is, by all appearances, a grudging concession. Steven Hayward, a conservative author and commentator, is against impeaching Obama, too, but urges the right to keep “loudly discuss[ing]” it.

This it will do. The impeachment vogue will likely fade a bit as Obama becomes a lame duck. And as 2016 approaches, the investigative apparatus of Congress might train its attention more fully on Hillary Clinton. But dreams die hard. During the George W. Bush Administration, some Democrats held fast to their own fantasies of impeachment until the end; in June, 2008, with just half a year left in Bush’s tenure, Representative Dennis Kucinich, of Ohio, introduced a resolution to impeach the President on thirty-five counts. Impeachment, as James Bryce observed, in 1888, is “the heaviest piece of artillery in the congressional arsenal,” and so it will always have a powerful appeal for those whose politics are a form of insurrection.

The hysteria that was a periodic feature of our politics in the twentieth century is a permanent one in the twenty-first. The fever, on the right, never breaks; the tide never recedes; the end is always nigh. When America, as a large measure of the Republican Party believes, is surrendering by degrees to its enemies abroad; when federal agents are biding their time until they come for your guns; when collectivism is about to be imposed and Christmas banned; when even progressive taxation or deficit spending are seen as high crimes, as they’re portrayed by Palin and others, what Bryce called the “hundred-ton gun” of impeachment will always be aimed at the Oval Office. It’s not only enough to make one nostalgic for Rodino and the “decent men” of the Judiciary Committee. It might just be enough to make us miss Nixon.