House to Vote Again on Mayorkas Impeachment: Live Updates

Indeed, threats of impeachment have become a favorite pastime for Republicans following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump, who has pressed his allies for payback for his own two impeachments while in office. The chances of Mr. Mayorkas, much less Mr. Biden, ever being convicted in the Senate, absent some shocking revelation, seem to be just about zero, and the others appear in no serious danger even of being formally accused by the House.

But impeachment, once seen as perhaps the most serious check on corruption and abuse of power developed by the founders, now looks in danger of becoming a constitutional dead letter, just another weapon in today’s bitter, tit-for-tat partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals made clear that a president could feel assured of keeping his office no matter how serious his transgressions, as long as his party stuck with him, and the impeachment-in-search-of-a-high-crime efforts of the Biden era have been written off as just more politics.

“Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious mechanism of executive branch accountability,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is of a piece with the decline of norms across Washington institutions and the ever-rising weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.”

In crafting the Constitution, the framers opted to include an impeachment clause to prevent the despotism Americans had just freed themselves from in the Revolution. At first, they decided that presidents and other officers could be subject to impeachment by a majority in the House and conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate for “treason or bribery.”

George Mason thought that was too limited and proposed adding “maladministration” as an impeachable offense, meaning incompetence. But James Madison objected, deeming it too broad and arguing that it would make the president subject to the whims of the Senate. Mason backed down but then proposed as an alternative the phrase “or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It was elegant, but the framers did not define it precisely. Alexander Hamilton made clear that the phrase meant offenses that “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself” — in other words, not any old crime would be impeachable, but only those that were an offense against the people or the system.

It was meant to be rare and for decades it was. Only 21 times has the House voted to impeach a government official, and only eight times has the Senate convicted and removed them from office, all of them judges who otherwise had life tenure. The only other cabinet official targeted for impeachment, William Belknap, the war secretary under President Ulysses S. Grant accused of corruption, resigned tearfully minutes before the House took up his case in 1876, but lawmakers voted to impeach him anyway.

It was so rare that no president was impeached until 1868, when President Andrew Johnson came within one vote of being convicted in the Senate. It took 130 years for there to be another presidential impeachment, against Bill Clinton, who was also acquitted, and just 21 years passed between the second presidential impeachment and the third, involving Mr. Trump.

A little over a year passed between the third and the fourth, when Mr. Trump was impeached a second time. If the House impeaches Mr. Biden, there will have been three presidential impeachments in five years — more than in the previous 230 years of the republic combined.