“Four CEOs Were Dethroned Just This Week,” Forbes reported one day before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she was opening an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s conduct. In fact, 2018 saw a record 18 percent of large‐​company chiefs forced out, according to the article. “Mercurial, flamboyant and self‐​destructive CEOs” are increasingly being told to hit the bricks “when their questionable ethics pose a threat to the reputation, mission or growth of their companies.”

A good thing, too: All the way up the corporate ladder, the ability to replace an underperforming or misbehaving employee is essential to keeping companies nimble and responsive. Free competition in America’s labor markets is, according to libertarian legal scholar Richard A. Epstein, “the surest road to social prosperity and business success.”

Not when it comes to the chief executive officer of the federal government, however: That guy should be harder to fire than a New York City public school teacher, apparently. “Impeachment is the ultimate constitutional sanction” requiring “the most serious deliberations,” Epstein wrote as debate heated up in September. “For Democrats to pursue the risky impeachment option shows more about their frenzied collective state of mind than it does about Trump’s many foibles.”

Epstein is hardly alone in that hypercautious view. Judging by how long it takes us to get there and how rarely we do it, Americans seem profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of firinga president. Before 2019, we’d made only three serious attempts at it in our 230‐​year constitutional history, impeaching just two of 44 U.S. presidents: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Only Richard Nixon, who quit before the full House could vote, was (effectively) removed from office via the impeachment process.

Meanwhile, over the last century, the American presidency has grown vastly more powerful—and more dangerous—than America’s Founders could ever have imagined. On the home front, our presidents increasingly rule by executive order and administrative edict; abroad, the commander in chief’s war powers have become practically uncheckable: He can add new names to the Predator‐​drone kill list, and even launch thermonuclear “fire and fury,” virtually at will.

You could blame the system, and you’d have half a point. Our Constitution’s Framers took a broad view of impeachable “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Per Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 65, presidents could be defenestrated for the “abuse or violation of some public trust.” Alas, the founding fathers also stuck us with the nearly insurmountable two‐​thirds requirement for conviction in the Senate—an innovation that came late in the Convention and that was approved without debate.

By accident as much as design, our system makes it painfully difficult to remove a president. And the political culture makes it harder still, by erecting barriers nowhere to be found in the Constitution. We’ve come to view the process as a source of constitutional crisis itself, rather than as a potential solution to one.

Yet if history is any guide, we have little to fear from what’s shaping up to be our fourth serious effort at presidential impeachment. Whether it succeeds or not, the attempted firing of Donald Trump will cause the republic little harm and may even do it some good.