History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, by the House of Representatives, and his trial by the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors in office, 1868Ross, Edmund G. (Edmund Gibson)
History
History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, by the House of Representatives, and his trial by the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors in office, 1868
Ross, Edmund G. (Edmund Gibson)
Johnson, Andrew, 1808-1875 -- Impeachment
If the Senate is a Court bound to judicial forms on the expulsion of the
President, must it not be the same in the expulsion of a Senator? But
nobody attributes to it any such strictures in the latter case. * * In
the case of Blount, which is the first in our history, the expulsion was
on the report of a committee declaring him guilty of a high misdemeanor.
At least one Senator has been expelled on simple formal motion. Others
have been expelled without any formal allegations or formal proofs. * *
* The Constitution provides that "Each House shall determine its rules
of proceeding." The Senate on the expulsion of its own members has
already done this practically and set an example of simplicity. But it
has the same power over its rules of proceeding on the expulsion of the
President, and there can be no reason for simplicity in the one case
not equally applicable in the other. Technicality is as little consonant
with the one as with the other. Each has for its object the PUBLIC
SAFETY. For this a Senator is expelled; for this, also, the President is
expelled. Salus Populi Suprema Lex. The proceedings in each case must be
in subordination to this rule."
Thus, Mr. Sumner would have removed the President by an ordinary
concurrent resolution of Congress.
The purpose of all this was apparent--that the President was in effect,
to be tried and judged before a Court of Public Opinion, and not before
the Senate sitting as a High Court of Impeachment, but BY the Senate
sitting in its legislative capacity--to create the impression in the
minds of Senators that in this high judicial procedure they were still
acting as a legislative body--simply as Senators, and not in a judicial
capacity, as judges and jurors, and therefore not bound specifically by
their oaths as such, to convict only for crime denounced by the law, or
for manifest high political misdemeanors, but could take cognizance
of and convict on alleged partisan offenses and allegations based
on differences of opinion and partisan prejudices and partisan
predilections--that it was not essential that the judgment of Senators
should be confined to the specific allegations of the indictment, but
that the whole range of alleged political and partisan misdemeanors and
delinquencies could be taken into account in seeking a pretext for Mr.
Johnson's conviction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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