Stop Comparing Trump?s Impeachment Case to Johnson?s ? or Nixon?s ? or Clinton?s

We’ve simply never had a case before where the removal of a president was so well justified—while at the same time so obviously unlikely to happen.The 1868 impeachment of Johnson grew out of a power struggle between a reactionary president and the “Radical Republicans” who held power in Congress. Johnson sent word that he would relent in his fights with the Republicans if they let him stay in office, helping him to prevail by just one vote.In Johnson’s case, the constitutional questions—are impeachment and conviction justified?—were open to debate. Those counts, as well as one for Nixon’s defiance of congressional subpoenas, were powerful enough to convince several Republicans to join the Democrats in supporting Nixon’s ouster.In Nixon’s case, then, impeachment charges were clearly justified on constitutional grounds. After taking up impeachment in October, the House Republicans promptly lost congressional seats in the 1998 midterm elections—an almost unheard-of development—providing strong clues that their partisan crusade would founder in the Senate, where even some Republicans came to voice qualified support for the president. Unlike in Clinton’s case, the constitutional argument for it looks increasingly powerful: We have fairly damning evidence from the White House itself of a direct conversation between Trump and the Ukrainian president about going after Biden. Impeachment could galvanize voters against the president, but it could also backfire, as Bill Clinton’s impeachment did against Republicans.