from the audience in Des Moines about
Steyer’s Presidential ambitions drew a
loud cheer from the attendees and a
non-denial denial from Steyer. The
only state where Steyer’s tour has con-
ducted three events is Iowa, the site of
the nation’s first caucuses.
Steyer professes to understand the
diference between political opposi-
tion to a President and support for a
President’s removal from oice. “We
are not impeaching him because we
don’t like his tax policy,” Steyer told
me. “He is reckless, dangerous, and
lawless.” But people at the town hall
didn’t worry too much about the fine
distinctions, and neither, for the most
part, does Steyer. Attendees told me
that they wanted Trump removed
because he’s racist, because he’s sur-
rounded by unsavory characters, be-
cause he doesn’t care about the poor.
Jennifer Spradling, a retired preschool
teacher, had travelled two hundred
and forty miles, from the town of
Alton, to hear Steyer speak. Trump
“doesn’t seem to have the moral prin-
ciples and ideals that Presidents have,”
she said. “He’s done nothing on health
care, on infrastructure.” Several audi-
ence members mentioned, as a ground
for impeachment, the Washington
Post’s running tally of more than three
thousand falsehoods that Trump has
told since the Inauguration. The one
phrase I never heard during the eve-
ning in Des Moines was “high crimes
and misdemeanors.”U
ltimately, every consideration of im-
peachment returns to the standard
established in the Constitution. The
words are among the most familiar in
the nation’s founding document, even if
their meaning has been the subject of
two hundred years of debate. Article II
states, “The President, Vice President
and all civil Oicers of the United States,
shall be removed from Oice on Im-
peachment for, and Conviction of, Trea-
son, Bribery, or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors.” As in the nineteen-sev-
enties and the nineteen-nineties, the
prospect of a Presidential impeachment
has spurred renewed academic interest
in the subject, resulting in two recent
volumes by well-known Harvard law
professors. Last year, Cass Sunstein, who
served in the Obama Administration,
released “Impeachment: A Citizen’s
Guide,” and Laurence Tribe, the noted
liberal academic and litigator, has just
published “To End a Presidency: The
Power of Impeachment,” written with
Joshua Matz. Michael Gerhardt is also
producing a third edition of his treatise
“The Federal Impeachment Process.”
The historical record on impeach-
ment, including at the framing of the
Constitution, is meagre. There were afew references to it at the Constitu-
tional Convention, and in the debates
in the states over ratification the subject
came up in a limited way. The Framers
recognized that the power to impeach
was as much a political issue as a legal
one. As Alexander Hamilton put it, in
Federalist No. 65, impeachment should
apply to “the misconduct of public men,
or, in other words, from the abuse or
violation of some public trust.” Ham-
ilton said that high crimes and mis-
demeanors “are of a nature which may
with peculiar propriety be denominated
POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to in-
juries done immediately to the society
itself.” (This quotation was a favorite of
Clinton’s defenders in 1998 because it
suggested that purely personal miscon-
duct, like lying about an extramarital
afair, should not be the basis for im-
peachment.) Hamilton also anticipated
the partisan divisions that impeach-
ment would engender, writing that the
process “will seldom fail to agitate the
passions of the whole community, and
to divide it into parties more or less
friendly or inimical to the accused.”
In modern terms, one pole in the
debate over impeachment was defined
by Gerald Ford, during his days as a
congressman, when he led a failed at-
tempt to impeach the Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas, in 1970,
for purportedly improper financial deal-
ings. “An impeachable ofense,” Ford
said, “is whatever a majority of the
House of Representatives considers it
to be at a given moment in history.” At
the other extreme from Ford’s almost
tautological approach is the claim that
only proof beyond a reasonable doubt
that a President committed criminal
ofenses can justify an impeachment.
To some, the best distillation of the
standard is a report produced by the Ju-
diciary Committee in 1974, on the eve
of its debate about the Nixon impeach-
ment. (One of the committee’s stafers
was a young lawyer named Hillary
Rodham.) The report states clearly that
impeachable ofenses do not necessar-
ily have to be crimes. Instead, it argues,
impeachment should be “a remedy for
usurpation or abuse of power or serious
breach of trust,” such as “ofenses against
the government, and especially abuses
of constitutional duties.” The emphasis,
the authors wrote, “has been on the