In the first installment of this series, I introduced the concept that our impeachment system is fatally flawed.  In the second installment, I provided evidence of this contention by discussing all eighteen historical cases of federal impeachment.  Now, it's time to draw some conclusions.

Of the eighteen impeachments that have taken place since the U.S. Constitution was adopted, we need not concern ourselves with the three men who resigned rather than face full trials in the Senate.  In addition, three of the fifteen remaining impeachment defendants would not have gone to trial under today's laws: William Blount and William Belknap, who were not technically under the Senate's jurisdiction at the time impeachment proceedings reached that body, and the insane John Pickering, who would have been removed from the bench under infirmity laws adopted in 1919 rather than being impeached.

Of the twelve remaining cases -- those which would not be dismissed or resolved before being brought to the Senate today -- five were politicized to a level that perverted the impeachment process itself.  These were the cases of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the charges against whom were almost wholly fabricated for political reasons; Justice Samuel Chase, who was impeached as part of Thomas Jefferson's court-packing scheme; Judge Harold Louderback, who was a victim of Fiorello LaGuardia's ambition; and Judge Charles Swayne, a bullying and abusive judge who was acquitted because of his sympathetic co-partisans.

If you're keeping track, that's a startling figure: nearly 42% of impeachment cases are politicized.  Any judge in America who politicized 42% of his cases would be summarily impeached himself.  As it stands, there's no question but that our impeachment mechanism is broken -- but not necessarily beyond repair.  Not to be outdone by Senators Schumer, Feinstein, Feingold, and Whitehouse, I've come up with a series of three recommendations for how to repair impeachment.  Here's the first one:

In Part I of this series, I explained the purpose behind these diaries: to explore the failed mechanism of federal impeachment and suggest ways to fix its flaws.  Yesterday, though, we examined only the instances where impeachment worked: nine cases handled according to protocol, with appropriate outcomes and streamlined processes.  Today, we'll look at the flip side of the coin: nine cases where impeachment was inappropriately politicized or should never have occurred at all owing to procedural errors or a lack of other removal methods.

As mentioned in the previous installment, my major source for the following is this PBS timeline; other sources include this U.S. Senate article, and this collection of documents from JusticeLearning, though I've consulted additional sources (including Wikipedia and JSTOR) and my own memory where necessary.

I'm one of the few bloggers out there who doesn't believe we should be pushing for impeachment of President Bush -- even though I think he's clearly committed impeachable crimes.  My reasoning is not based on Bush's guilt or innocence, but on the fact that impeachment as a mechanism is broken and needs significant repair before it can be viewed as a legitimate means of removal from office of any public official, much less a U.S. President.

People who say there are few precedents for impeachment don't, with respect, know what they're talking about.  It's true that only three Presidents have been impeached by the U.S. Congress; but limiting impeachment to that set ignores the fact that federal impeachment has been tried no less than eighteen times since our country's founding; its victims have included, in addition to the three Presidents, a United States Senator, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a Secretary of War, a U.S. Commerce Court Judge, and eleven U.S. District Court judges.  Meanwhile, a large number of federal officials who clearly committed impeachable offenses were not impeached for one reason or another.  At least one prominent political criminal was not able to be impeached: Vice President Aaron Burr, whose treasonous acts were committed in the last month of his term and who was subsequently tried for treason after he had been out of office for two years.  Others who got away include Iran-Contra mastermind Caspar Weinberger and Teapot Dome malefactor Albert B. Fall.  We'll come back to these impeachments-that-never-were in Wednesday's final installment.

While no one's guilt can ever be completely proved or disproved, but the eighteen cases of impeachment can be pretty clearly grouped into two categories: those for whom the impeachment process worked properly, and those whose impeachments were botched or who should never have been impeached at all.  In today's installment, we'll examine nine impeachment cases that were properly treated by the Senate; tomorrow, we'll look at nine cases where impeachment failed or was unnecessary.  On Wednesday, I'll discuss some conclusions and suggest three recommendations for how to fix our broken system of impeachment.

My major source for the following is this PBS timeline; other sources include this U.S. Senate article, and this collection of documents from JusticeLearning, though I've consulted additional sources (including Wikipedia and JSTOR) and my own memory where necessary.

So my song for you this evening, it's not to make you sad

Nor for adding to the sorrows of our troubled northern land

But lately I've been thinking and it just won't leave my mind

I'll tell you of two friends of mine who were both good friends of mine

-- Tommy Sands, from "There Were Roses"

At a used bookstore hidden in a bargain barn several months ago, I picked up an intriguing book.  The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative was the memoir, said its jacket, of former Congressman Robert Bauman, a conservative Republican from Maryland's Eastern Shore.  I opened the book's cover and entered into the sordid world of Washington gay culture -- a world peopled with individuals desperate to indulge their sexual desires but terrified of exposure to their constituents.  Such a combination of fear and need creates a cocktail for destruction.  This is the story of that destruction -- and how it brought down two leading lights in Maryland politics.

Your Republican Congressperson wants to torture poor women.

You see, poor women [having an abortion] don't get the "luxury" of general anesthesia. The dignity and comfort- not to mention humanity- of sleep cost extra. A Poor woman has to stay awake. She feels the cold of the famous (or should I say infamous) stirrups in a room full of doctors and technicians. She endures seven needles plunged into her cervix. Men don't even have a body that comes close to causing that kind of pain. ... Once the shots have been administered, and the "numbing" begins hard metal is used to pry open the cervix to allow access to the uterus. ... Again, this is pain only women ever get to know. And I put quotation marks around "numbing" because it's not as if the woman doesn't feel all of this. She does. She feels the center of her being being spread wide and she feels the scraping of her uterus. The scraping of her uterus. Or the "vacuuming". Either way, it's not a way a human should be awake for on a Saturday morning.

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner penned The Significance of the Frontier in American History, the monograph that inaugurated the study of cultural history and identified one of the principal archetypes in American consciousness.  The concept of the frontier had been bound up with the Jacksonian doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which essentially was the American desire to take and consume in the name of progress; but Turner teased out frontier spirit as a separate, and uniquely American, phenomenon:

All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.

(Hat-tip to strandsofpearl at Whimsy Designs for the fantastic image.)

Come one!  Come all!  Join me, Nonpartisan, and lots of other awesome people (Lorraine, Unitary Moonbat, Raybin, eugene, weeping for brunnhilde, musing85, Linnaeus, Tony Seybert, and idiosynchronic) at our new online home: Progressive Historians, History and Politics Of, By, and For the People.

I wanted to share with y'all this fantastic and hilarious video that's randomly popped up on the Internet, targeting two-term Republican Congressman Rick Renzi:

So Happy Together

The video is posted on RejectRenzi.com, which seems to be made by the people who put up the famous Canoodle between Renzi and Rep. Katherine Harris:

This site isn't affiliated with the Caccioppoli campaign -- in fact, I spoke with Mike last week and he said he has no idea who put this up -- but I like what they have to say about the race:

I have that "katrina look" today. Let me tell you why.

A guy came up to the truck looking pretty worn out. I asked him if he was okay and he proceeded to tell me how he'd stepped on something hard this morning. It had a leash attached to it. 6 months ago, it was his dog.

I hadn't heard from my friend Bethany in a while, not since she graduated from my college and went off to be a VISTA volunteer for the Red Cross.  Then, the other day, I discovered her LiveJournal, and it seems she's volunteered to be in New Orleans, in the Ninth Ward, feeding people twelve hours a day.

If you remember anything from your high school civics class, you may recall that the Equal Rights Amendment was one of the few proposed constitutional amendments in American history that passed both houses of Congress by the required two-thirds majority but failed to be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures.  I knew that much about the ERA, and no more.  But, acting on an exhortation by mediagirl to "give a shit" about the bill, I decided to do a little digging.  What I found was a truly appalling state of affairs and an almost complete apathy on the issue of women's equality among the Democratic cognoscenti.

The most common comment we get at Schweitzer for President goes something like this: "Why draft a candidate who doesn't want to run, who has no record yet, who isn't experienced, when there are so many good candidates to choose from?"  For me, the answer is simple: not only do I not like any of the candidates that are likely to run, I don't think a single one of them can win in 2008.

I'll explain why, and why drafting Schweitzer is not without precedent, on the flip.

Introducing the Draft Schweitzer 2008 petition, designed to convince Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer of the tremendous grassroots support he will find if he agrees to stand for the Presidency in 2008.  Now those of us who want the Governor to run can finally take direct action on his behalf!

If you want more information about Schweitzer before signing, there's a wonderful article here, or you can visit our website, Schweitzer for President, which aims to be the most complete Schweitzer resource on the Web.

Please note -- and this is important: you DON'T have to be certain that you're voting for him in order to sign the petition.  You just have to want the guy to run.  Running will increase his national stature and help spread his reformist Democratic message across America, revitalizing the Democratic Party and helping it win elections.

You heard me.  All those guys whose names are on the Declaration of Independence -- not one of them had ever fought in a war.  John Adams?  A lawyer.  Thomas Jefferson?  A plantation owner.  Benjamin Franklin?  A jack-of-all-trades and career diplomat.  John Hancock?  A merchant.  But not ONE of them ever fought in the military.

And what about the big guy, Georgie Washington?  Yeah, he fought some -- but he couldn't exactly be called a stellar military genius before the Revolution broke out.  His major claim to fame was advising a British general not to lead a Redcoat army in full regalia into a trackless forest in hostile Indian territory.  The general ignored Washington's advice and got himself shot along with most of his army.  Not exactly fodder for war hero status.

So does that mean the Revolution shouldn't have been fought?

Uber-conservative columnist Morton Kondracke, who apparently is a Democrat despite thinking the Republican Party is "not conservative enough," recently penned this editorial (registration required, or use Bugmenot) eviscerating the Creationism-in-schools argument: