In the first two centuries of the United States government, the House of Representatives conducted only two presidential impeachment procedures.
By the time the sun set on Wednesday, he had driven three in just 25 years – with two of them in the past year and a half, against the first president to suffer two impeachments.
Welcome to the story.
With the majority of the House voting on Wednesday afternoon for the impeachment of President Trump on charges of inciting an insurrection, just 13 months after the chamber impeaching on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, here is a view Overall what happened at times.
Donald Trump, 2019
In September 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would open an impeachment investigation against Trump.
She took that step – which she had previously resisted – in response to a phone call in which Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and the Mr. Biden’s son Hunter. The call came shortly after Trump froze nearly $ 400 million in aid to Ukraine.
The resulting accusations declared that Trump abused his power by using government aid as a lever to persuade Ukraine to help him electorally, and that he obstructed Congress by refusing to provide documents and telling government officials not to testify. The Chamber impeached it on December 18, 2019, voting 230 to 197 to approve the abuse of power charge and 229 to 198 to approve the obstruction charge.
After weeks of hearings, lawmakers split almost entirely along party lines: no House Republicans voted to impeach any of the charges, all but two Democrats voted for the abuse of power and all but three Democrats voted for the obstruction charge.
On February 5, 2020, the Senate acquitted Trump of the two charges: 52 to 48 for abuse of power and 53 to 47 for obstructing Congress. Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, joined the Democrats in the vote to remove him from office for abuse of power, becoming the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party.
Bill Clinton, 1998
The impeachment process against President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, began in October 1998 in response to the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with a White House intern.
The charges related not directly to his misconduct with intern, Monica Lewinsky – who was 22, almost three decades younger than Clinton when he started – but to the claim that Clinton lied under oath and encouraged others to do the same. same.
“I didn’t have sex with that woman,” said Clinton in January 1998, before admitting months later that she did. “I never told anyone to lie, not once. Never.”
On December 19, 1998 – 21 years, almost the same day, before a Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump – the Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The votes were 228 to 206 on the perjury charge (with five Democrats voting for impeachment and five Republicans voting against) and 221 to 212 on the obstruction charge (with five Democrats voting in favor and 12 Republicans voting against).
The Chamber voted against impeachment on a second charge of perjury and abuse of power.
On February 12, 1999, the Senate acquitted Clinton 55-45 on the perjury charge, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats, and 50-50 on obstruction charges, with five Republicans joining Democrats. It would take a two-thirds majority to convict Clinton and remove him from office.
Richard Nixon, 1973
Congress never voted to impeach President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, but only because he resigned before that.
The impeachment process largely stemmed from the Watergate scandal, which began in 1972 when Nixon associates stormed the Democratic National Committee headquarters. This invasion was part of a huge coordinated effort to influence the upcoming election, which Nixon ended up winning in one of the biggest landslides in American history.
The immediate catalyst for the House Judiciary Committee’s decision to initiate the impeachment process on October 30, 1973, was the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, ten days earlier. It was that night that Nixon, enraged by Watergate’s investigation, ordered the dismissal of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Two officials he ordered to fire Cox refused to do so and resigned; the third, Attorney General Robert Bork, obeyed.
The commission finally approved three impeachment articles – obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt for Congress – and forwarded them to the House floor in July 1974. The articles passed three separate votes, with the accusation of abuse of power piling the majority support: 28 to 10, with seven Republicans on the committee and all 21 Democrats.
But before the House could complete its hearings and vote on impeachment, Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974 – the day after Republican leaders in Congress told him that his support for his own party had collapsed and that he almost certainly be accused and convicted.
Andrew Johnson, 1868
More than any president who was impeached after him, Andrew Johnson was impeached not for a specific violation of the law, but because of a broad power struggle between the White House and Congress.
Johnson – a Democrat and white supremacist who was Vice President of Abraham Lincoln and became President when Lincoln was assassinated – spent much of his term in confrontation with the Republican-controlled Congress on reconstruction. Among other things, he vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to provide American citizenship to ex-slaves; Congress subsequently overturned its veto of the Civil Rights Act.
In March 1868, the Chamber approved 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson. The main charge was that he violated the 1867 Mandate Law, which Congress had enacted in an explicit effort to prevent him from firing Lincoln-appointed pro-Reconstruction officials. The law stated that the president needed Senate approval to fire Senate-confirmed executive officials, and Johnson challenged it by dismissing War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton.
In May 1868, Johnson reached a single vote to be removed from office. The Senate – then made up of 54 members because there were only 27 states at the time – voted 35 to 19 in favor of the conviction, but needed 36 votes for the required two-thirds majority.
He served the remainder of his term, just under a year.