#midterms2018

What Everyone Needs to Know Q&A: Donald Trump’s presidency has brought the nation back to familiar constitutional territory: talk of impeachment. As the US political climate heats up in the lead-up to the 2018 Midterm Elections, we want to know:

How useful is impeachment? 

The framers purposefully made impeachment difficult to achieve. In order to impeach, convict, and remove someone from office, the government has to go through several hoops. Getting through all these successfully is hard. Other than the impeachment of a pres­ident, vice president, or Supreme Court justice, an impeachment is unlikely to generate much interest among the public and there­fore little motivation in the members of Congress to put aside other business for the sake of participating in impeachment proceed­ings. The likelihood that impeachment diverts members from work is more likely to be pertinent to their re-election, and the fact that impeachment is cumbersome has made impeachment quite un­common as a recourse for handling the misconduct of certain public officials. It has been surprisingly rare in our history: the House has impeached only nineteen people; and of those, only eight were convicted and removed from office. Of the people convicted in an impeachment trial by the Senate, all have been lower- court federal judges, three of whom were not only removed from office but also disqualified from ever holding another federal office or receiving any federal pensions for their federal service.

[Page 22, Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Michael J. Gerhardt]