Long before Trump, impeachment loomed over multiple presidents

WASHINGTON — As President George Bush prepared to order U.S. troops into war to eject Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, he feared it could end his presidency. “If it drags out,” he dictated to his diary Dec. 20, 1990, “not only will I take the blame, but I will probably have impeachment proceedings filed against me.”

Eleven days later, in a letter to his children, he quoted a Democratic senator telling him that “if it is drawn out,” he should “be prepared for some in Congress to file impeachment papers.”

On the day the war began, a Democratic congressman did just that, introducing a resolution of impeachment accusing him of “conspiring to commit crimes against the peace.”

Fortunately for Bush, the war was relatively brief, and efforts to impeach him fizzled. But he was hardly the only president to worry.

While President Donald Trump is just the fourth commander in chief in U.S. history to confront a serious threat of impeachment, the prospect hung over many of his predecessors.

A deterrent

Impeachment has served not just as a means for removing a corrupt president from office, as outlined in the Constitution; in fact, it has never actually accomplished that purpose. Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached by the House but acquitted after Senate trials, while President Richard Nixon resigned before the full House could vote. But impeachment has served as a deterrent, a consequence that presidents had to consider when making decisions that crossed into questionable territory.

As conceived by the framers of the Constitution, impeachment was never meant to remedy incompetence or policy differences, akin to a vote of no confidence in a parliamentary system, but it was reserved for larger offenses against the republic. But the framers never explained precisely what they meant, and so each generation has, in effect, redefined it.

Early efforts

The first formal impeachment effort against a president came in 1843 when a House member introduced a resolution calling for an inquiry against President John Tyler for “arbitrary, despotic and corrupt abuse of the veto power” after he rejected two tariff bills favored by his own Whig Party.

The clash was a test of Tyler’s legitimacy. He was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency after President William

Henry Harrison died a month into his term, and Tyler had no strong support in either political party. The matter came to a vote by the full House, which rejected the resolution 127-83.

A few years later, Abraham Lincoln was warned by an adviser that he might be impeached if he abandoned Fort Sumter.

Andrew Johnson

Johnson’s impeachment by the House in 1868 followed previous attempts to impeach him on other charges. The House voted the year before to authorize an investigation of his conduct, and the House Judiciary Committee reported an impeachment resolution, but the full House defeated it 108-57.

Only after he fired Edwin Stanton, the war secretary allied with the Radical Republicans in Congress, did the House vote to impeach Johnson.

His acquittal by a single vote in his Senate trial did not discourage future lawmakers from turning to impeachment. In 1896, a congressman introduced a resolution to impeach President Grover Cleveland in a dispute over the sale of bonds.

During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover faced an impeachment resolution for increasing unemployment and taxes — a tad belated, since it was submitted in December 1932, a month after he lost reelection.

Richard Nixon

Like Johnson, Nixon faced down impeachment before Watergate. Three resolutions were introduced against him in 1972 charging him, among other things, with breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam War and escalating the air war. None were acted on and Nixon was reelected.

But 17 more resolutions were introduced over the next year focused on his secret war in Cambodia, the firing of the Watergate prosecutor and illegal wiretapping of journalists and critics. Twenty more resolutions were later introduced. Yet when the House Judiciary Committee ultimately approved three articles against him, lawmakers kept them focused on Watergate.

Ronald Reagan

President Ronald Reagan was threatened with impeachment twice. Eight House members introduced a resolution to impeach him in 1983 over his invasion of Grenada, which was referred to committee and never acted on. Four years later, Rep. Henry Gonzalez, D-Texas, introduced six articles of impeachment stemming from the Iran-Contra scandal. The White House feared impeachment was a real danger, but Democratic congressional leaders decided not to proceed to avoid a divisive fight. The same Gonzalez introduced the impeachment resolution against Bush Jan. 16, 1991, as the Persian Gulf War opened, then proposed a second one a month later. Neither was acted on.

Clinton, Bush and Obama

Clinton, like Johnson and Nixon before him, was targeted for impeachment more than once.

Eighteen House members offered a resolution calling for an inquiry in 1997, a year before independent counsel Ken Starr filed his report leading to Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up an affair with a former White House intern.

President George W. Bush faced impeachment efforts by backbench Democrats over the invasion of Iraq on what turned out to be false reports that Baghdad had unconventional weapons.

Some conservative Republicans talked about impeaching President Barack Obama over everything from the Benghazi attack to the birther conspiracy theory without following through. But Obama took the possibility more seriously in 2013 when he considered a military strike against Syria to retaliate for a chemical weapons attack, a factor that influenced his decision to abort the plan.