The Senate Is About to Abolish Impeachment
A Trump acquittal, coupled with Clinton’s, will gut Congress’s most important check on presidential power.
The 45th president of the United States is reportedly “going crazy” after the House of Representatives impeached him Wednesday. But the biggest casualty of the current impeachment exercise isn’t Donald Trump’s emotional state. It’s the power of Congress to exercise the impeachment prerogative in the first place.
Trump is only the third president, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, to be called to account in this way. And in all likelihood, Trump will join his predecessors as the third to evade removal after trial in the Senate. A Trump acquittal, coupled with Clinton’s two decades ago, could mark the demise of impeachment as a meaningful lever of presidential oversight. Together, the outcomes of the two
