Why the Americans should have resurrected this practice in 1787 is something of a puzzle, until you remember that all but one of England’s original thirteen American colonies had been founded before impeachment went out of style. Also, while Parliament had gained power relative to the King, the Colonial assemblies remained virtually powerless, especially against the authority of Colonial governors, who, in most colonies, were appointed by the King. To clip their governors’ wings, Colonial assemblies impeached the governors’ men, only to find their convictions overturned by the Privy Council in London, which acted as an appellate court. Colonial lawyers pursuing these cases dedicated themselves to the study of the impeachments against the three Stuart kings. John Adams owned a copy of a law book that defined “impeachment” as “the Accusation and Prosecution of a Person for Treason, or other Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Steeped in the lore of Parliament’s seventeenth-century battles with the Stuarts, men like Adams considered the right of impeachment to be one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. And when men like Adams came to write constitutions for the new states, in the seventeen-seventies and eighties, they made sure that impeachment was provided for. In Philadelphia in 1787, thirty-three of the Convention’s fifty-five delegates were trained as lawyers; ten were or had been judges. As Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, reports in a new book, “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump,” fourteen of the delegates had helped draft constitutions in their own states that provided for impeachment. In Philadelphia, they forged a new sword out of very old steel. They Americanized impeachment.

This new government would have a President, not a king, but Americans agreed on the need for a provision to get rid of a bad one. All four of the original plans for a new constitution allowed for Presidential impeachment. When the Constitutional Convention began, on May 25, 1787, impeachment appears to have been on nearly everyone’s mind, not least because Parliament had opened its first impeachment investigation in more than fifty years, on April 3rd, against a Colonial governor of India, and the member charged with heading the investigation was England’s famed supporter of American independence, Edmund Burke. What with one thing and another, impeachment came up in the Convention’s very first week.

A President is not a king; his power would be checked by submitting himself to an election every four years, and by the separation of powers. But this did not provide “sufficient security,” James Madison said. “He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.” Also, voters might make a bad decision, and regret it, well in advance of the next election. “Some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate is rendered indispensable by the fallibility of those who choose, as well as by the corruptibility of the man chosen,” the Virginia delegate George Mason said.

How impeachment actually worked would be hammered out through cases like the impeachment of Samuel Chase, a Supreme Court Justice, but, at the Constitutional Convention, nearly all discussion of impeachment concerned the Presidency. (“Vice President and all civil Officers” was added only at the very last minute.) A nation that had cast off a king refused to anoint another. “No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should continue,” Mason said. “Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?”

Most of the discussion involved the nature of the conduct for which a President could be impeached. Early on, the delegates had listed, as impeachable offenses, “mal-practice or neglect of duty,” a list that got longer before a committee narrowed it down to “Treason & bribery.” When Mason proposed adding “maladministration,” Madison objected, on the ground that maladministration could mean just about anything. And, as the Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris put it, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that “an election of every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mason therefore proposed substituting “other high crimes and misdemeanors against the State.”

The “high” in “high crimes and misdemeanors” has its origins in phrases that include the “certain high treasons and offenses and misprisons” invoked in the impeachment of the Duke of Suffolk, in 1450. Parliament was the “high court,” the men Parliament impeached were of the “highest rank”; offenses that Parliament described as “high” were public offenses with consequences for the nation. The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” first appeared in an impeachment in 1642, and then regularly, as a catchall for all manner of egregious wrongs, abuses of authority, and crimes against the state.

In 1787, the delegates in Philadelphia narrowed their list down to “Treason & bribery, or other high crimes & misdemeanors against the United States.” In preparing the final draft of the Constitution, the Committee on Style deleted the phrase “against the United States,” presumably because it is implied.

“What, then, is an impeachable offense?” Gerald Ford, the Michigan Republican and House Minority Leader, asked in 1970. “The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” That wasn’t an honest answer; it was a depressingly cynical one. Ford had moved to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, accusing him of embracing a “hippie-yippie-style revolution,” indicting him for a decadent life style, and alleging financial improprieties, charges that appeared, to Ford’s critics, to fall well short of impeachable offenses. In 2017, Nancy Pelosi claimed that a President cannot be impeached who has not committed a crime (a position she would not likely take today). According to “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who testified before Congress on the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” during the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, both Ford and Pelosi were fundamentally wrong. “High crimes and misdemeanors” does have a meaning. An impeachable offense is an abuse of the power of the office that violates the public trust, runs counter to the national interest, and undermines the Republic. To believe that words are meaningless is to give up on truth. To believe that Presidents can do anything they like is to give up on self-government.

The U.S. Senate has held only eighteen impeachment trials in two hundred and thirty years, and only twice for a President. Because impeachment happens so infrequently, it’s hard to draw conclusions about what it does, or even how it works, and, on each occasion, people spend a lot of time fighting over the meaning of the words and the nature of the crimes. Every impeachment is a political experiment.

The ordeal of Samuel Chase is arguably the most significant but least studied impeachment in American history. The Chase impeachment was only the third ever attempted. In 1797, the House had impeached the Tennessee senator William Blount, who stood accused of scheming to conspire with the British and to enlist the Creek and Cherokee Nations to attack the Spanish, all with the design of increasing the value of his highly speculative purchase of Western lands. (“Whether the scheme was merely audacious or just plain crazy remains debatable,” Bowman writes, darkly foreshadowing more recent shenanigans, involving the possible acquisition of Greenland.) The case rested on a letter allegedly written by Blount, describing this plan; after two senators said they recognized Blount’s handwriting, the Senate expelled him in a vote of 25–1, and he slinked off to Tennessee. The House had voted to impeach, but Blount’s lawyers argued that senators are not “civil officers,” and so can’t be impeached. (“#IMPEACHMITTROMNEY,” Trump tweeted recently. The Blount precedent went some way toward establishing that this is an impossibility.) The motion to dismiss was read aloud in the Senate by Jefferson, who was Vice-President at the time.

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Samuel Chase’s troubles began when Congress passed the 1798 Sedition Act, aimed at suppressing Republican opposition to John Adams’s Federalist Administration. Chase, riding circuit (which Supreme Court Justices used to do), had presided over the most notorious persecutions of Republican printers on charges of sedition, including the conviction of the printer James Callender. The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801, the day before Jefferson’s Inauguration, but, through a series of midnight appointments, Adams had connived to insure that Jefferson inherited a Federalist Supreme Court. Chase had actively campaigned for Adams and spoke intemperately for the bench, denouncing Republicans. In an overheated charge to a grand jury in Baltimore, he attacked Republicanism, describing it as “mobocracy.” Jefferson set an impeachment in motion when he wrote to House Republicans, “Ought this sedition and official attack on the principles of our Constitution . . . go unpunished?”

If the proceedings against Blount tested whether senators could be impeached, the proceedings against Chase tested a new theory of executive power—that Supreme Court Justices serve at the pleasure of the President. This test came in the wake of Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, in which John Marshall’s Supreme Court exercised a prerogative not specified in the Constitution: the Court had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. A Republican leader of the Senate told the Massachusetts senator John Quincy Adams that he hoped to impeach the entire court. Judicial independence? Judicial review? No. “If the Judges of the Supreme Court should dare, AS THEY HAD DONE, to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional . . . it was the undoubted right of the House of Representatives to remove them, for giving such opinions,” he said. “A removal by impeachment was nothing more than a declaration by Congress to this effect: You hold dangerous opinions, and if you are suffered to carry them into effect you will work the destruction of the nation.”