To Impeach or Not to Impeach: A New Era of Partisan Warfare
Trump speaking in the White House after the Senate impeachment trial. Photo by D. Myles Cullen.
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
—Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution
The above constitutional provision has justified presidential impeachment on four separate occasions since the founding of the nation: President Andrew Johnson in 1868, President Bill Clinton in 1998, and President Trump in 2019 and 2021. In other words, during the nation’s first two centuries, only one president was impeached; yet, since the 1970s, the country has seen four separate impeachments. How is it that Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution was rarely employed throughout the first two centuries of United States history but has been increasingly frequent in recent decades? What factors—legal, political, or otherwise—have contributed to the increasing frequency of the impeachment process? Are modern presidents simply more corrupt? Or, have presidents always been committing impeachable offenses and we are just now catching onto their missteps?
The answer, it seems, lies in one fundamental aspect regarding the way in which Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution was constructed. The founders, as argued by Harvard law professor Albert Broderick, did not ultimately codify impeachment as a legal process. Rather, they vested this power in the hands of a political body. The constitutional framers set vague standards for impeachment, leaving the “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause up to interpretation by future congresses—to be used either as “leeway or ammunition,” as argued by Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow. During the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, Chernow explains, there was also debate over whether the Supreme Court should have the final judgment in determining a president’s removal from office rather than the Senate. And while it may now seem inconceivable, the Framers, specifically Hamilton, argued that only the indirectly elected officials of the Senate (as it formerly operated) could be trusted as the impartial arbiter in the impeachment process. And so, per the Framers’ intentions, impeachment was codified as a political process intended to be relatively removed from factional and electoral politics.
The insulation between impeachment and faction politics changed, however, with the ratification of the 17th Amendment, along with recent political polarization. These developments have given way to the highly volatile and partisan impeachment process we know today.
With the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, the Senate became a directly elected chamber—and therefore a body very much at the mercy of electoral politics. From this point on, impeachment could no longer be viewed as an extreme ‘last resort’ political process unaffected by electoral incentives. Rather, impeachment became, and continued to be, controlled by elected officials motivated by partisan politics and, most significantly, winning re-election. It has become the ultimate political weapon subject to the political climate of the times, and in the current era, the political climate can be described as none other than increasingly polarized along partisan and ideological lines.
So, to understand this new era of presidential impeachment, we must first address the question of the times: why are we so polarized? The question has scholars, journalists, and laypeople alike disagreeing on the root causes.
One hypothesis points to the realignment of political ideologies along party lines after the New Deal era. Prior to the mid-20th century, both parties relied on patronage across social classes. In other words, there was no strong correlation between income and party identification. And more specifically, prior to the 1960s, neither the Democratic nor Republican Party saw homogenous ideological preferences—primarily liberalism and conservatism—among their party patrons. Consider the Democratic Party pre-1960s, for example; for most of its history, the Democratic Party maintained a highly conservative voting bloc among Southern Democrats, most notably the short-lived Dixiecrat wing of the party. It was therefore not uncommon to identify as a conservative Democrat or liberal Republican. To the modern eye, these identifications may seem rather oxymoronic. Political ideology and partisan identity, however, began to diverge during the mid-century, giving way to the ideological-partisan congruence we know today. The 1960s, specifically, saw the emergence of a new party system uniquely drawing on social and cultural cleavages, and central to this realignment was the issue of race. Southern Democrats—a solid voting block long opposed to Black civil rights—all but abandoned the party over its sponsorship of the civil rights movement. Similarly, during the Reagan years, the Republican Party more definitively claimed a conservative image, especially with regard to cultural issues As a new century dawned, no longer were parties divided solely along class lines. Rather, the cultural issues we commonly see in pop-politics today—such as gay marriage, immigration, and abortion—slowly united voters across varying social classes along converging partisan and ideological lines. Thus, ‘conservative’ became synonymous with ‘Republican’ and ‘liberal’ with ‘Democrat.’
The cultural concerns that steer the Democratic and Republican parties create an environment of political polarization that is heightened further by the rise of partisan media and a closely divided electorate. According to Gallup Polls, as of September 2021, the portion of the electorate identifying as Republican and Democratic is exactly tied. Such divides have led to close election after close election, each one deemed the most important of its time. At the end of the day, this volatile polarization has led politicians to further weaponize the impeachment process.
In addition to increasing polarization, another factor that has contributed to the normalization of impeachment along party lines is the combination of increasing polarization and weakening political parties. While the climate of today’s politics alludes to parties that are stronger than ever, they are, in fact, quite weak. Partisan ideas have successfully infiltrated the electorate, but party organization has been far less successful over the past century. The duality of “weak parties and strong partisanship,” as Vox reporter and Marquette University Professor Julia Azari argues, is a dangerous combination. The combination points to an inevitability of the rise of candidate extremism and candidate-centered elections as opposed to party-sponsored moderate candidates appealing to the median voter. In other words, partisan voting and party identification still matter a lot to voters, but party control of candidate nominations has become quite limited. Party elites, nonetheless, are still ultimately incentivized to endorse these extreme—often political outsider—candidates to maintain party unity. One of the most dangerous manifestations of this combination is the “distrust… for the other side,” as Azari argues. What does this mean for impeachment? As party loyalty runs deep among its patrons, impeachment becomes the ultimate stage to air one party’s distrust of the opposition. As the average voter and party elites alike are more prepared than ever to back their party’s candidate, partisan politics will likely hold increasing sway over presidential impeachments.
Beyond the successful impeachments of the past decades, the very idea of the impeachment process no longer looms as a potentially dangerous undermining of the electoral process when wielded in the wrong hands. Calls for impeachment barely grab the media’s attention anymore, let alone the electorate’s. The term ‘impeachment’ is thrown around casually, with both parties claiming legitimate use of the Constitutional provision. Even before the election of former President Trump in 2016, for example, Republican officials and voters alike were preemptively calling for the impeachment of then presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. Similarly, some liberal advocacy groups called for the impeachment of then President-Elect Trump in the days before his inauguration.
The Trump impeachments, specifically, gave way to a new understanding of impeachment as a tool for political reckoning. In the wake of the first Trump impeachment in 2019, former Trump White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, chillingly claimed that “from here on out, most Presidents will now get impeached when the opposite party holds the House.” Is his claim a threat? Or rather a mere warning? Representative Kelly Armstrong (R, ND), similarly warned that the normalization of impeachment would create a political game of tit-for-tat: when the opposition party controls the House, the House will inevitably go after the sitting president in an endless game of political retaliation. And indeed, many prominent Republican Party leaders have called for the impeachment of President Biden over his handling of the Afghanistan crisis. In an era of volatile political maneuvering, impeachment has become the ultimate weapon in a game of partisan warfare and political retribution.
Or has it?
After all, it was the American electorate, not impeachment, that removed former President Trump from office during his reelection attempt in 2020. To this point, of the last three presidential impeachments, all were acquitted by the Senate. Given the Senate’s partisan volatility mirroring that of the electorate, it is highly unlikely the Senate would ever convict a sitting president of the majority party given the requirement of a two-thirds Senate supermajority vote for removal from office. While it is common for a newly elected president to see their own party control both chambers of Congress, only once since 1969 has this unification lasted longer than the following midterm elections. Given the unlikelihood of an administration with consistent party control over both the House and the Senate, the chances of a removal from office grow even slimmer as no party would likely. In other words, divided government has become a commonality in contemporary politics, a recurrence that makes impeachment in the House followed by a conviction in the Senate highly unlikely.
Still, impeachment—and calls for impeachment—have only grown more frequent in recent years and the political fallout of this normalization has not yet been solidified. For example, will the American electorate—many of whom can now recall multiple presidential impeachments—be conditioned to understand impeachment as an offensive political tactic? Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Cornell University, voiced concerns that the Trump impeachment may “condition the public to understand impeachment as a tool of normal politics.” Disregarding the abuses of power Trump committed while in office, these concerns—initially shared by prominent party leaders such as Speaker Pelosi—present the very real possibility that reactionary politics may further degrade the impeachment process to a highly partisan tool similar to that of the Senate filibuster. Moreover, in light of this new game of impeachment, it still remains unclear if Congress will prioritize the integrity of the highest office in the land—or if they too will normalize the process as a tool of partisan warfare.
One thing does remain clear, however. The last three impeachments both reflect the country’s political divide and deepen it. The reality remains that increased politicization of impeachment will not likely heal a deepening partisan divide within the American electorate. The reality, in fact, seems quite the opposite.
Jae Grace (BC ‘24) is a staff writer for CPR planning to double major in political science and economics on the pre-law track.