Considering…

And this. https://t.co/OO34cnHdZd pic.twitter.com/alntGrFUdp

— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) August 5, 2022

Andrew Johnson certainly deserved to be removed from office and escaped that fate by one vote.

And Nixon resigned because of the threat of impeachment, and was pardoned by Ford (probably in an arrangement with Nixon, and part of the reason Nixon resigned).

Then impeachment lost much of its sting when Clinton was impeached just because the GOP House could, not because he deserved it. Which pretty much rendered impeachment a purely political tool with no particular consequences. Which insulated Trump despite the fact he was the first President to be impeached twice.

We’ve never had a workable mechanism for removing corrupt, wicked, or dangerous chief executive 

In short, impeachment was a scary loaded gun in the shelf. That’s part of the reason it was so rarely used. It was supposed to be the neutron bomb of representative government, the weapon of last resort. But unlike Chekhov’s gun, when it appeared, it didn’t go off. Four times now it has appeared in Act I of a presidency and our national story; and four times it has failed to go off in the final act. At some point you realize it’s just an odd and useless prop.

Presidents serve four years, or eight years. But the first four can be all they serve, and the last four he’s already a lame duck. Besides, every GOP Administration after Ike’s has produced scandals, two deemed bad enough to warrant impeachment. And yet since Ike we’ve had 12 Presidents; 6 of those Republicans. We the people don’t seem bothered by scandal or the institutional failure of impeachment. That’s a problem, but I’m not sure what the Constitutional amendment is that will fix it.

We’ve never had a workable mechanism for removing corrupt, wicked, or dangerous chief executives, because the one we have has never worked. The only one that works is the four year election cycle. What we really need is to reconsider the populist method we use to nominate Presidential candidates. We’ve had gross electoral corruption in American politics before. Now our candidate selection process is so debased it’s perfectly conceivable we would happily elect a wicked, corrupt, and dangerous executive.

Of course, that’s always been possible. What’s never been possible, in practice, is that we could remove such a person from office absent the regular election cycle.

🤷‍♂️ Same as it ever was.