by Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.
Part One–What is the threat and reality of Impeachment–1969-2008
Article II, Section IV of the United States Constitution provides:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
When a President is accused of a crime, he most will inevitably be convicted in the press before he faces any official authority. The first official authority he will likely face will be either a Special Prosecutor empowered by Congress, who will endeavor to engage in a semi-traditional, closed- door investigation; and/or a hearing before an Investigative Committee, an institution that has often served this Country well, but too often encourages the most dishonest and venal partisan grand-standers and saboteurs because these public hearings blur the separate roles of investigation and trail.
No American President has ever faced a criminal trail for misconduct committed in office, his trail is an Impeachment before the House of Representatives, and if found guilty there, he faces a second trail, this time in the Senate. Perhaps it would be better to say that the trial in the House is the equivalent of a Grand Jury proceedings, resulting in the President either being indicted or the charges dropped, while the Senate is the real trail. Only two US Presidents were ever Impeached by the House (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton). Both Administrations were found not guilty during the Senate trial.
Any American can file Articles of Impeachment against any President, but lacking the House Judiciary Committee voting on those Articles, they are nothing but pieces paper with a lot of black marks on them. I have no doubt that every President has had hundreds of such Articles filed against them by the tin-foil-hat-brigade.
It is somewhat more serious when a member of Congress starts calling for the Impeachment of a President, but as Congress 
seems to have a higher percentage of grand-standers and saboteurs than most professional collectives, so most of these calls are often of little more merit than the aforementioned tin-foil-hat-brigade. Not only silly, but substantive allegations can fall by the wayside, as demonstrated in recent history where some more serious calls for Presidential accountability have failed to find support among other members of Congress, and many serious issues remain unaddressed in via that mechanism. (That doesn’t mean the issues were successfully swept under the rug. In any society there always other mechanisms and accountabilities, both official or unofficial, direct to the issue or circuitous.)
Over the course of the last eight Presidencies, a space of almost fifty years, there has been only one Impeachment, but the very serious talk, and often serious threat, of Impeachment hanging over all but two of these men, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, both of whom served only a single term (or less), a correlation that I suspect hints at causation.
As for the others:
Richard Nixon–After it was definitively established that he was aware of criminal activity by his staff, covered that activity up, and destroyed evidence, the House Judiciary Committee voted on Articles of Impeachment against him. Knowing that the trail would not clear him, he became to first American President to voluntarily resign from office. Though he was disciplined by his professional organization (he was barred from practicing law) he did not face criminal charges because the incoming President, Ford, pardoned him. In doing so, Ford guaranteed that he would not be re-elected.
Ronald Reagan–His administration broke the record previously held by Nixon for the largest number of aides and appointees that were either indicted for criminal charges, or resigned in order to escape indictment. All these scandals reflected badly on his administration, but only when the Iran-Contra affair–an over-complicated and incompetently executed scheme involving illegal arms trades with both a terrorist sponsoring nation in the Middle East and rebel army in Central America that was persona-non-grata with Congress–was exposed and definitely traced back to his office and his decisions, created a substantial Impeachment threat. In this case, though the evidence against Reagan was quite strong, there was no broad support among members of Congress to put the Country through that process again.
George Bush Sr–Though his one term proved less scandal-prone than Nixon and Regan’s two terms, he had to face one specific charge that made all others pale in comparison–he was accused of treason. In the October Surprise Scandal it was alleged that as a Vice-Presidential Candidate, Bush Sr. conspired against President Carter’s diplomacy and made a side-deal with Iran to delay the release 52 American hostages long enough for Regan to win the election. In a show of professionalism that seems as distant from the conduct of current Congress as the ideals of the Enlightenment, the investigations were conducted largely without grand-standing or sabotage. The conclusion of these investigations were definitive and aptly summarized on the front cover of Time magazine, “The Charge Treason; The Evidence Myth.” With that, the threat of Impeachment rightly evaporated.
Bill Clinton–If one wants to look to where our current Congressional dysfunction began, it would be in how the opposing party conducted themselves during the Clinton Administration. It was the first time in my short life that scurrilous allegations, investigations and empty calls for Impeachment were taken so seriously. The death of Clinton aide Vince Foster required three separate investigations, two empowered by Congress, to conclude the obvious–that the man on taking too-weak prescription for 
anti-depressants, found alone with a gun in his hand, gunshot residue on that hand, a single bullet in his head, no other wounds on his body, and a suicide note in his briefcase, had indeed killed himself. The Whitewater investigation–an ethics allegation concerning his and his wife Hillary’s relationship to a real estate scheme that had exploded six years before his election–ballooned into the longest and most expensive investigation in US Congressional history, but when it was finally closed in 1998, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr was forced to publicly admit he found no evidence of either criminal misconduct or ethics violations against either Clinton. Starr was not finished with Clinton though, because at the same time, Starr was successfully conflating a trivial extra-martial affair into a Constitutional crisis. Clinton had lied under oath about the affair, leading to perjury charges, but those charges were unsustainable because of issues of materiality (his lie could not reasonably be seen as impactful on the outcome of the specific case he was being questioned about). This led to the House Judiciary Committee voting on the Articles, him being Impeached by the House, then cleared by the senate. Unlike Nixon, he was neither given a Pardon or Immunity from Prosecution after he left office; there was no need as there was no criminal case to make. He was punished by his professional organization in a manner similar to Nixon.
George Bush Jr.–The Impeachment threats made against Bush Jr. largely revolved around misleading Congress and the American people regarding the justifications for the war in Iraq and the secret steps to redefine the word “torture” to create a legalistic pretense to permit conduct that violated both American and International Law in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. As in the case of Regan, though there were calls for Impeachment, there was no broad support among members of Congress to put the Country through that process.
In Part Two of this series, Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr. will discuss the cries for impeachment that were directed toward President Barack Obama beginning a mere seven weeks after he was sworn into office. Stay tuned…