Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans need an impeachment history lesson

Republicans are desperate to cast the impeachment of Donald Trump — which the House of Representatives voted to approve on Wednesday night — as unprecedented. Never before, they insist, has an impeachment been so partisan. Never before has the process been so rushed.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, embraced this strategy repeatedly over past few weeks. Echoing law Professor Jonathan Turley, the Republicans’ expert witness on the House Judiciary Committee panel, McCarthy maintained that “this would be the fastest. . . impeachment in U.S. history.” Four days later the 23rd District congressman remarked, “In modern history, we’ve never gone after impeaching a president in the first term.”

Judging by these comments, McCarthy and his fellow Republican lawmakers could use a history lesson.

In the holiday spirit, I’d like to offer them a brief refresher, one drawn from my U.S. Reconstruction course at Fresno State, which just wrapped up.

For one, America’s first presidential impeachment — of Democrat Andrew Johnson in 1868 — was every bit as partisan an affair as Trump’s, which did not attract any support among House Republicans. In the former case, the Republican-dominated House voted 126 to 47 along party lines to impeach Johnson, a Southern-sympathizing conservative who had worked to block Radical Republican efforts to reconstruct the nation in a more egalitarian fashion after the Civil War. Not a single House Democrat broke ranks and voted with the majority. There was nothing bipartisan about it.

(It is worth noting, by the way, that when it comes to presidential impeachment partisanship is not inherently a bad thing. After all, to insist that impeachment’s legitimacy rests on support from both sides of the aisle is to limit the legislative branch’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to check the power of the executive branch.)

Second, Johnson’s impeachment in some ways proceeded with even greater speed than Trump’s. The first House investigation of Johnson, to be fair, lasted for the better part of 1867, while the Trump inquiry began two and a half months ago — in late September. But this fall’s impeachment inquiry was far more intensive than the 1867 investigation, which waxed and waned throughout the year. And when the House finally voted on Johnson’s impeachment in December, it overwhelmingly opposed the resolution. Impeachment at that point seemed dead in the water.

But Johnson’s impeachment was resurrected two months later, on Feb. 21, 1868, when the president violated the Tenure of Office Act by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval. The House immediately opened formal proceedings, and after just two days of discussion it voted to impeach the president on Feb. 24 — before House members even bothered to draw up articles of impeachment. The Republican leadership spent the next few days hurriedly crafting the 11 articles outlining the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors before the Senate impeachment trial opened on March 5. Johnson’s impeachment trial, in sum, began less than two weeks after the event that had precipitated it. It is hard to move faster than that.

What about Rep. McCarthy’s claim that Donald Trump is the only president to be impeached in his first term?

This argument is either patently false — or deliberately misleading and ultimately meaningless. Once again, we must look to Andrew Johnson, who, like Trump, was in his first term when he was impeached in 1868.

But, one might ask, what if McCarthy meant to exclude Johnson with his “in modern history” qualifier? Perhaps. Yet such a reading cuts the minority leader’s sample size down to one, Bill Clinton, who was impeached in 1998 during his second term. (Richard Nixon resigned before the full House voted on his articles of impeachment.) In other words, McCarthy’s sweeping generalization about our impeachment record necessitates the elimination of half the relevant evidence — the Johnson impeachment — and that is hardly sound analysis.

History, in the end, is messy. It isn’t easily carved up into neat soundbites. But in an era plagued by false or misleading statements — including more than 15,000 by President Trump himself, according to The Washington Post — we should insist that our public servants, Republican and Democratic alike, strive to get U.S. history right.

Facts matter, and not just because Americans need a clear-eyed vision of our past. They also matter because we need an accurate and informed perspective on the debates and developments that shape the nation’s present and future, not least of which is the impeachment of Donald Trump.

And if you’d like to learn more about America’s first presidential impeachment, may I suggest Brenda Wineapple’s engaging new history, “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” which would make an excellent holiday gift.

This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans need an impeachment history lesson."