What You Need to Know About Impeachment

On September 24, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives will launch impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Trump will become the fourth president in American history to face an impeachment inquiry.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” Pelosi said. Trump, she added, “must be held accountable—no one is above the law.”

The decision was prompted by new allegations that Trump tried to elicit a foreign power’s help in his re-election by pressuring the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden; Biden is a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. President Trump has denied any wrongdoing and called the impeachment inquiry “presidential harassment.”

The constitutional process for trying to remove a president from office is complicated. Here’s a look at how impeachment works.

The Constitution permits Congress to remove presidents before their term is up if they’re found to have committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment is the first step in that process.

The Framers established impeachment as a safeguard against a president abusing the office. Having just fought for independence from the tyranny of King George III, they worried about presidents becoming too powerful. So they divided the federal government into three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial—that have the ability to check one another’s power, and they gave the House of Representatives “the sole power of impeachment.”

There’s no easy answer, because the Constitution doesn’t actually say. The Framers specifically mentioned treason and bribery as impeachable offenses but didn’t list the “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

However, most people take the phrase to mean a serious abuse of power or grave misconduct in office. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a law was broken.

Constitutional scholars still debate the vague phrase’s meaning. But they often look to Alexander Hamilton’s writings for guidance. In one of the Federalist Papers in 1788, he described impeachable offenses as those “which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

Now that Pelosi has announced a formal impeachment inquiry, subcommittees that have been investigating the president for other alleged offenses will look into the new allegations as well. They’ll call on witnesses to appear before Congress, and they’ll ask for documents.

If the subcommittees determine there’s enough evidence of wrongdoing, they’ll bring formal charges, known as articles of impeachment, to the full House. The House, which is currently controlled by the Democrats, would then hold a vote on one or more of them. If at least one gets a majority (218 votes), the president would be impeached.

The next step is a trial in the Senate overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A team of lawmakers from the House, known as managers, would play the role of prosecutors, presenting the case against Trump. The president would have defense lawyers, and the senators would serve as the jury. If at least two-thirds of the senators find the president guilty, he is removed from office, and the vice president takes over as president.

That has never happened. Two presidents have been impeached by the House—Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 (see “On Thin Ice,” below)—but both were acquitted by the Senate and remained in the White House for the remainder of their terms. In the case of Richard Nixon, once it became clear that there was enough support in Congress to remove him from office, he resigned.

Because the Senate is controlled by Republicans, 20 Republican senators would have to vote to convict Trump, along with all 47 Democrats,* to reach the 67-vote threshold needed to remove him. Experts say that seems unlikely.

That thinking is exactly what made Democratic leaders resistant to impeachment for so long. And some political observers believe impeachment proceedings could help Trump get re-elected next year by energizing his most ardent supporters.

“This is the fight that traps the Democrats into an increasingly unpopular position,” says Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and a Trump supporter. “It is a win-win for Trump,” he adds.

But many Democrats now say that regardless of the political fallout, this has become a matter of principle and they’re obligated to act. “The future of our democracy is at stake,” says Congressman John Lewis of Georgia.

No matter how the inquiry plays out, experts say it’s a historic moment.

“It’s a huge deal that the step has been taken,” says Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. “We’re heading into something that is a rarity in American life. This is ratcheting it up to a very different level.”

*This includes two Independents who caucus with the Democrats.

With reporting by Nicholas Fandos and Charlie Savage of The New York Times.