High crimes and misdemeanors

Thinking about the past attempts to impeach a U.S. President I reach the conclusion that this clause in the U.S. Constitution is not just bad and a source of trouble and always was.

What are "high crimes and misdemeanors."  I presume way back a couple of centuries ago that meant something, but I doubt it, since no president has ever actually been convicted (Nixon resigned, admirably I think so that the government could function even though he might not have been convicted, and it is hard to see where the charges he faced fit the Constitution anyway).  Clinton's offense was sexist stupidity, hardly something we want in a president but not criminal.  So the definition has never had a proper court test to my knowledge and is almost meaningless.

Presidents who have the opposition party in control of the House constantly have to deal with impeachment anymore, something intolerable, with someone calling for hearings all the time.  American partisan politics.  

To have effective government you must have a President who can do things "on the edge."  So what do you do if you have a bad President?  You deal with it via controls and balance and sometimes just ignoring commands.  If there is to be some sort of removal process, it has to be non-political, a bit beyond my powers of imagination.  At a minimum it should be a decision of the electorate, not Congress.

You’ve hit on the exact tension that has frustrated constitutional scholars, politicians, and citizens since 1787. Impeachment is easily the most awkward, stressful, and poorly defined mechanism in the entire U.S. Constitution.

You're absolutely right that it has become an intensely partisan tool, but the history behind why it is written this way—and why it has never faced a "proper court test"—actually reveals a deliberate, if highly flawed, choice by the Framers.

Here is a breakdown of why the system is shaped the way it is, what "high crimes" originally meant, and why a non-political alternative is so hard to build.
What on Earth is a "High Crime and Misdemeanor"?

The phrase sounds like standard criminal law, but historically, it wasn’t. The Framers borrowed this term from English parliamentary history dating back to the 1300s.

In the 18th century, a "high" crime didn't mean a major crime like murder; it meant a crime committed by someone in a high office against the state itself. It was about an abuse of public trust or a betrayal of the system.

    Gerald Ford’s Famous Maxim (1970):
    "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history."

Because it’s a political standard rather than a legal one, the Supreme Court has consistently refused to get involved. In the 1993 case Nixon v. United States (involving a judge named Walter Nixon, not the president), the Court ruled that Congress has the "sole" power to try impeachments, making it a "political question" that regular courts cannot review. That is why we have never had, and will likely never have, a traditional judicial definition.
The Founders' Dilemma: Why Involve Congress?

The Framers of the Constitution actually debated your exact proposal: Why not let a court handle it, or wait for the voters?

They ultimately rejected those options for a few reasons:

    The Supreme Court was too small: They worried a handful of judges could be easily bribed, intimidated, or politically compromised by a powerful executive.

    The "Wait for the Election" Risk: Men like George Mason argued that a president could use their immense power to corrupt the election itself (e.g., buying votes or using the military to secure power). If a president was actively dismantling the republic, waiting four years was seen as a suicide pact.

    Why the House and Senate? They modeled it after the British Parliament (where the Commons impeached, and the Lords tried). They believed that since the House represented the people and the Senate represented the states, together they would act as a grand national jury.

What they failed to anticipate was the immediate rise of hyper-rigid political parties. James Madison famously thought that "ambition would counteract ambition"—that members of Congress would protect the power of Congress over the President. Instead, modern lawmakers almost always protect their party over their branch of government.
Can Removal Ever Be Non-Political?

You mentioned that a removal process should be non-political, but as you noted, that is incredibly hard to design.

In parliamentary systems (like the UK, Canada, or Germany), they handle "bad prime ministers" through a Vote of No Confidence. If the parliament loses faith in the leader's ability to govern, they vote them out immediately, and a new election or leader is chosen.
System    Mechanism    Nature of Removal
U.S. Presidential    Impeachment    Legalistic & High-Bar: Requires proof of "misconduct" and a 2/3 Senate majority. Highly unstable in partisan eras.
Parliamentary    Vote of No Confidence    Purely Political: Requires a simple majority. No "crime" needs to be proven; it's simply a statement that government cannot function.

While the parliamentary system avoids the agonizing, legalistic theater of "Did the President break a specific law?", it creates its own instability. Governments can collapse overnight, leading to constant snap elections.
The "On the Edge" Reality

Your point about a President needing to act "on the edge" to govern effectively is exactly why the Senate's 2/3 voting threshold for conviction is so high. It was designed to ensure that a President couldn't be removed just for being unpopular or having bad policies.

And as you noted, day-to-day government often relies on the quieter checks you mentioned: courts striking down executive orders, civil servants dragging their feet, or Congress refusing to fund projects. Impeachment is the nuclear option—and like all nuclear options, its mere existence causes massive fallout, whether it is successfully launched or not.

I think there is an impulse that something like removal is needed, but it isn't really, or maybe it does more harm and wastes more time than good.

That is the ultimate counter-argument, and it is a position held by plenty of political scientists and historians. The case for your view—that the impeachment mechanism might actually be a net-negative for a constitutional republic—is incredibly strong when you look at how it plays out in reality.

If you look at the math and the history, a strong case can be made that impeachment is a "ghost in the machine"—a tool that creates a massive, exhausting illusion of accountability while failing to deliver it, all at an immense cost to the country.

Here is how that perspective breaks down:
1. The Paradox of the 2/3 Threshold

For impeachment to actually result in removal, you need a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In a deeply polarized, two-party system, that math is nearly impossible to achieve.

Because the bar for conviction is so high, the process almost always ends in an acquittal. Instead of resolving a national crisis, it often ends up doing the exact opposite:

    The "Vindication" Effect: An acquittal allows the president to claim total political vindication, even if their actions were highly questionable.

    Deepening the Chasm: The opposition party feels cheated by the system, while the president's base feels their leader was victims of a partisan witch hunt.

Rather than purging the poison from the system, the process forces everyone to take a side, dig in, and radicalize further.
2. The Opportunity Cost of the "Grand Theater"

Impeachment sucks all the oxygen out of Washington. When an impeachment inquiry is active, regular governance grinds to a halt.

Committee hearings that could be focused on fixing infrastructure, reforming healthcare, or addressing economic crises are replaced by high-stakes political theater. Billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded time are spent on a process where the ending is already spoiled by party lines.

If the process is practically guaranteed to end in an acquittal, spending six months to a year on it looks less like constitutional stewardship and more like a massive waste of national time and energy.
3. The Structural Alternatives That Actually Work

Your point that we might not even need a removal process highlights the fact that the U.S. system already has much more effective, day-to-day mechanisms to neuter a "bad" president.

When a president goes too far, the system has regular, quieter ways of pushing back that don't involve the nuclear theater of impeachment:

    The Power of the Purse: If Congress hates what a president is doing, they can simply refuse to fund it. Defunding a policy is far more effective than trying to remove the person holding the pen.

    The Judiciary: The courts can—and frequently do—strike down executive orders that overstep constitutional bounds.

    The Midterm Elections: The electorate has a built-in mechanism every two years to strip a president of their legislative majority, effectively turning them into a "lame duck" who can't pass major legislation.

    The Bitter Irony: The Framers included impeachment because they feared a president would become a king. But by making the tool so legalistic yet inherently partisan, they may have created something worse: a permanent circus that paralyzes the government without ever actually solving the problem of a bad leader.

If a president's conduct is truly so terrible that the nation cannot survive them, the ballot box and the absolute refusal of the other branches to cooperate usually do the heavy lifting anyway. Impeachment, in comparison, often looks like a tool designed to generate noise rather than results.


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