chapter: 
title: Influential Impeachment Cases
abstract: 
text: 
P: Over the course of the nation's history, several impeachment cases have been instrumental in the further evolution of the process.
order: 3
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section: 
section_title: Andrew Johnson
section_text: 
P: The bitter animosities growing out of the Civil War gave rise to the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, the most famous of all impeachment trials prior to that of President William Clinton in 1999. The first presidential impeachment in American history occurred in 1868. At the heart of the Johnson case, just as in earlier cases, lay issues far larger than the individuals involved. The Johnson case revolved around the crisis of Reconstruction after the war.
P: When Johnson succeeded to the presidency in 1865, his ideas for a mild Reconstruction of the southern states clashed with the wishes of a majority of the Congress, controlled by Radical Republicans who favored much stronger action. Throughout 1866, Johnson and Congress were locked in battle.
P: The Tenure of Office Act, the violation of which was to be the legal basis for impeachment, was passed over Johnson's veto on March 2, 1867. It forbade the president to remove civil officers appointed with the consent of the Senate without the approval of the Senate. Despite the certain consequences, Johnson decided to rid himself of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, an ally of the Radicals. On December 12, 1867, Johnson suspended Stanton, an act that enraged the Radical Republicans and set in motion events that led the House to vote eleven articles of impeachment against the president.
P: Johnson's Senate trial began on March 5, 1868, with the defense immediately claiming the necessity of an indictable offense for impeachment. On May 16, after weeks of venomous argument, the Senate took a test vote on Article XI, a catch-all charge thought by the House managers most likely to produce a vote for conviction. The drama of the vote has become legendary. With 36 "guiltys" needed for conviction, the final count was guilty, 35; not guilty, 19. Seven Republicans joined the twelve Democrats in supporting Johnson. Stunned by the setback, the Radicals postponed voting until May 26, when votes on Articles II and III produced identical 35-to-19 tallies. To head off further defeats, the Radicals moved to adjourn sine die, and the motion was adopted 34 to 16, abruptly ending the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
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section: 
section_title: Charles Swayne
section_text: 
P: Florida District Judge Charles Swayne was impeached in 1905. He was accused of filing false travel vouchers, improper use of private railroad cars, unlawfully imprisoning two attorneys for contempt, and living outside of his district. Swayne's trial consumed two-and-a-half months before it ended on February 27, 1905, when the Senate voted acquittal on each of the twelve articles. There was little doubt that Swayne was guilty of some of the offenses charged against him. Indeed, his counsel admitted as much, though calling the lapses "inadvertent." The Senate, however, refused to convict Swayne because its members did not believe his peccadilloes amounted to "high crimes and misdemeanors."
P: It was during the long Swayne trial that the suggestion first surfaced that a Senate committee, rather than the Senate as a whole, should receive impeachment evidence. Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts proposed that the presiding officer should appoint such a committee. While Hoar's proposal would eventually be embodied in Rule XI of the Senate's impeachment rules, in 1905 the resolution was referred to the Rules Committee, which took no action.
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section: 
section_title: Robert W. Archibald
section_text: 
P: The next impeachment trial was that of Judge Robert W. Archbald of the Commerce Court in 1913. Archbald was charged with numerous and serious acts of misconduct stretching over many years, including using his office to obtain advantageous business deals and free trips to Europe. As in the Swayne case, not one of the thirteen articles charged an indictable offense. Yet, apparently because of the seriousness and extent of his crimes, many of which he acknowledged, Archbald was convicted on five of thirteen articles. Alexander Simpson, Archbald's counsel, noted that the decision "determined that a judge ought not only to be impartial, but he ought so to demean himself, both in and out of the court, that litigants will have no reason to suspect his impartiality; and that repeatedly failing in that respect constituted a 'high misdemeanor'." After the Archbald trial concluded, his counsel also suggested that impeachment evidence be taken by a Senate committee. Simpson argued that many senators were not in attendance when evidence was taken before the full Senate and thus relied on the printed Congressional Record.
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section: 
section_title: Harold Louderback
section_text: 
P: In 1933, the House Judiciary Committee recommended censure, rather than impeachment, for federal judge Harold Louderback of California. A minority of the committee, however, took the issue to the floor of the House where they persuaded that body to adopt five articles of impeachment, charging Louderback with favoritism and conspiracy in the appointment of bankruptcy receivers. Louderback's Senate trial consumed nearly all of May 1933, during the New Deal's Hundred Days, one of the busiest legislative periods in congressional history. A long parade of witnesses, including a faith healer who had to be brought into the chamber on a stretcher, filed through to testify. Democrats charged Republicans with using the trial to delay a banking reform bill, a charge Republicans denied. Tempers in the Senate frayed as witness after witness cast doubt on the charges. When the Senate finally voted on May 24, 1933, Louderback was acquitted on all five articles. Only on the fifth and last charge, a summation of the preceding four, did the vote even reach a majority, still eight votes short of the two-thirds needed for conviction.
section_order: 
section: 
section_title: Rule XI
section_text: 
P: The trial of Judge Louderback again brought to the fore the problem of attendance at impeachment trials. After the trial, Representative Hatton Sumners of Texas, one of the House managers, recalled the scanty attendance: "At one time only three senators were present, and for ten days we presented evidence to what was practically an empty chamber." In 1934, Senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, offered the resolution that became Rule XI after its adoption the following year. The key words of Rule XI provide:
P: That in the trial of any impeachment the Presiding Officer of the Senate, if the Senate so orders, shall appoint a committee of senators to receive evidence and take testimony at such times and places as the committee may determine . . .
section_order: 
section: 
section_title: Halsted Ritter
section_text: 
P: Rule XI was not used in the next impeachment trial, that of Florida District Judge Halsted Ritter in 1936. Ritter was charged with a wide range of improprieties that included practicing law while a judge, filing false income tax returns, extortion, and an omnibus charge of misconduct. Ritter's counsel argued that the judge had committed no offense that could be labeled a high crime or misdemeanor and was guilty only of exercising "poor judgement." In fact, Ritter was found "not guilty" by narrow margins on each of first six charges. On the seventh, however, the omnibus article combining the previous six, Ritter was found guilty, by exactly the required two-thirds vote, of bringing, by his combined actions, "his court into scandal and disrepute." Said the New York Times of the decision: "The Senate is putting judges on notice that they will be removed if the sum total of their crimes shows unfitness for the bench regardless of whether a specific high crime or misdemeanor could be established under ordinary rules of evidence."
section_order: 
section: 
section_title: Richard Nixon
section_text: 
P: In the summer of 1974 it looked very much as though there might soon be an impeachment trial for a president of the United States, Richard Nixon. The events of those weeks precipitated a more thorough scrutiny of the Senate's impeachment rules than they had previously undergone. In July 1974, the Senate adopted a resolution directing the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration to review the existing impeachment rules and precedents and recommend revisions. The committee devoted long hours to serious reflection about the solemn duty the Senate believed it might be called upon to perform. The committee was meeting on August 8, when President Nixon announced that he would resign the next day. Nevertheless, the panel continued with its work under a mandate from the Senate to file a report by September 1. The report contained recommendations that were primarily technical changes in the rules that had been adopted in 1868 for the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. With the resignation of President Nixon, no further action was taken. The recommendations, however, were resurrected in 1986 and helped inform the debates on how to conduct the trials that resulted in the removal of three federal judges between 1986 and 1989, and again in 1999 when the Senate faced its second presidential impeachment trial.
section_order: 
section: 
section_title: William Clinton
section_text: 
P: On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President William J. Clinton, claiming the president had "willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process." The Senate trial began on January 14, 1999, and once again arguments focused on the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Falling short of the necessary two-thirds vote on either article of impeachment (Article I, 55 to 45; Article II, 50 to 50), the Senate acquitted President Clinton on February 12, 1999.
section_order: 
section: 
section_title: For Further Reading
section_text: 
P: Benedict, Michael Les, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).
P: Berger, Raoul, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
P: Robert C. Byrd, The Senate, 1789-1989 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1991).
P: Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
P: Hoffer, Peter Charles and N.E.H. Hull, Impeachment in America, 1635-1805 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
P: Buckner Melton, Jr., The First Impeachment: The Constitution's Framers and the Case of Senator William Blount (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998).
P: William H. Rehnquist, Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justices Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson (New York: William Morrow, 1992).
P: U.S. Senate. Procedure and Guidelines for Impeachment Trials in the United States Senate, by Floyd M. Riddick and Robert Dove, S. Doc. 93-102, 93d Cong., 2d sess., 1974.
P: U.S. Senate. Senate Manual. [latest edition]. See "Rules of Procedure and Practice in the Senate When Sitting on Impeachment Trials," revised August 16, 1986.
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parent: /artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Senate_Impeachment_Role
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