September 18, 2023 —
258 days after the GOP assumed control of the House after picking up 9 seats in the 2022 election;
414 days prior to the 2024 election;
38% of the distance to the November 2024 election.
When you strike at a king you must kill him. — Emerson
This is the first in a series of articles on the history and lessons related to American impeachments, totalling over 14,000 words. We will examine the five presidential impeachment efforts, the single Supreme Court justice impeachment, and the recent Texas Attorney General impeachment.
Only one of these seven attempts (Nixon) succeeded in removing their target from public office. To understand the likely course of the ongoing Biden impeachment process, it is necessary to study past initiatives. Prior to 2010, the U.S. Senate had conducted 16 impeachment trials. These included two Presidents, one Senator, one Secretary of War, and 14 federal judges. 50% of these, eight judges, were successfully convicted. The remainder were acquitted.
Many are under the misperception that the country is ready for Biden’s impeachment. We are a long way from that eventuality. The much-touted recent poll from late August showing 61% believing Joe was involved with Hunter’s “business” affairs was heavily overweighted with right-leaning voters, to the tune of 60% of those polled. This potentially skewed the results and the country may be more evenly divided, as suggested by a more recent Quinnipiac poll:
Half of voters (50 percent) think Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden's business dealings with Ukraine and China while Joe Biden was vice president, while 40 percent think Joe Biden was not involved.
Thirty-five percent of voters believe Joe Biden was involved and did something illegal in Hunter Biden's business dealings with Ukraine and China while Joe Biden was vice president, while 13 percent believe he was involved and did something unethical but nothing illegal,
Anybody who thinks the time to send an impeachment motion to the Senate when only 35% of the public is convinced of Biden’s guilt, needs to study the information we have assembled below to learn why that would not only be futile, but potentially very harmful to Republicans.
There was a time when the role now being played by a Matt Gaetz of a Marjorie Taylor Greene was played by Newt Gingrich. The young bomb throwers, sticking it to the opposition, heady with their new-found powers. Throwing the long bomb may play well to the party base and yield fundraising benefits, but is a losing political strategy. Politics is a game of singles and walks, rarely do home runs occur. If you swing wildly and miss, there is no safety net. Ask Gingrich — he left Congress for these very reasons.
With a House majority in the single digits, Republicans have no room for error. Handled properly, the Biden impeachment can yield enormous benefits at the polls next November. There is no need to rush. The longer this plays out, the better.
After months of hearings airing Biden family dirty laundry, the public will come to be where it needs to be to successfully launch an impeachment. Proceeding today would be a recipe for failure, as history underscores.
We begin with an autopsy of the Texas attempt.
The recent failed impeachment attempt directed at Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton illustrated two truisms:
a) impeachment is generally a political tool, rather its intended function to protect the system from criminality; and
b) impeachments usually fail.
The longer one studies past impeachments, the more evidence accumulates that they are too often the result of power drunk House members operating inside an echo chamber, convincing themselves they are on a mission which takes precedence over all other legislative resonsibilies. They are generally exercises in group think, mass psychology, mob mentality. Once they face the bright sunlight of a Senate trial, with senior legislators more attuned to poltical realities, they melt. Quickly. Who is more poltically astute — representatives or senators? Based on their respective numbers, senators are more than four times smarter. We just witnessed an exaggerated version of this with the failed Texas impeachment.
Paxton’s impeachment vote was not even close. In his concluding remarks after presiding over the Texas Senate impeachment trial, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (presiding officer of the Texas Senate during the Paxton impeachment trial), in an effort to provide guidance to future American state and federal impeachment efforts, made the following observations, fully applicable to both the Trump and Biden impeachment efforts:
Members. I have just a few minutes of comments, about five minutes. I've been unusually quiet for the last three months since the House of Representatives sent the articles of impeachment against the Attorney General to us on very short notice, in the final hours of the regular legislative session. The law requires the Senate to receive the articles and have a trial. And once I realized I would be the presiding officer and judge, I thought it was my duty to be quiet on this issue. Otherwise, how could I oversee a fair trial? I've done my very best to do so in the last three months, especially the last two weeks.
Now the trial is over. I want to take a few minutes before we close to put a few remarks on the court record for future legislatures to read in the event of another impeachment one day, on both what the House and Senate did. Senators, first I want to once again thank you for doing your work. You all were thorough. You were thoughtful. You were professional. I watched all of you each day listen intently to every word that was said by every witness. Many of you took notes nonstop. I want to thank the Rules Committee, Senator Birdwell, the chair. I want to thank the Rules Committee for their tireless work. Senator Hoffman, Senator West, Senator Hinojosa, Senator Creighton, Senator King, Senator Flores.
You worked many hours for the last three months. You wrote 31 rules that were approved by the Senate 25 to 3. And those senators, when you brought them to them, they made adjustments and suggestions to those rules, as you know. It was a collaborative effort from all members. All of us studied past impeachments, from all across the country, to learn from the mistakes of past impeachments. So we wouldn't make the same errors. Now the 31 rules weren't perfect, but you can be proud of the rules you passed. They were our guide for these last 90 days or so and through this process,
I want to mention one rule that really stands out to me for future legislatures, I believe, to follow. And that was putting a reasonable time clock on both parties to present their case. Otherwise this trial could have lasted as some others have for months, or at least four or five weeks. Both sides were in agreement immediately on the time clock and how it should be allocated. And I appreciate both parties for your cooperation, not only on that — and much of that was actually part of your suggestion as well — but on every rule. I said to both parties, when we met here a week before the trial to do a walk through, that we wanted to have a fair trial and protect the integrity of the body, the integrity of this great chamber.
And each of you fulfilled that. I was proud of both of you, how you conducted yourselves on the court. I feel it's important to set the record straight on this trial because I want people in the future to have a full picture of what happened. And how did we get here? I've spent most of the last 90 days, as many of you have, preparing for this trial. I've issued over 240 subpoenas. I've studied numerous motions, written multiple orders, read hundreds of pages of history, rules, documents, and worked on every detail of this trial with you and with our incredible secretary of the Senate, the clerk of the court who turned this chamber into a courtroom, and her great staff.
I have had a total view of this process from the very first day the House sent over the articles of impeachment to us in May. With all due respect to the House, we didn't need to be told in the final arguments how important this vote was. I believe the quote was: this will, if you're like me, be the hardest and most difficult, the heaviest vote that you will ever cast in your time in the legislature. This vote will be the vote you're remembered for. Most of our members already knew that and have known that for the last three months. If only the House members who voted for impeachment would have followed that instruction in the House, we may not have been here.
In the House the vote to send the articles of impeachment against the Attorney General to the Senate happened in only a few days, with virtually no time for 150 members to even study the articles. The Speaker and his team ran through the first impeachment of a statewide official in Texas in over 100 years, while paying no attention to the precedent that the House set in every other impeachment before. In the past, the House had transparent and open investigations for all to see, including other House members. The target of the investigation was notified and invited to attend with counsel, and given an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses that were placed under oath before testimony was taken.
At the conclusion of past House investigations, the evidence was laid out for weeks for House members to evaluate. Not ours. Before they took their vote on articles of impeachment, Representative John Smithy, a longtime House member who has argued cases before the Texas Supreme Court, spoke on the House floor during the impeachment vote in May. He was one of only 23 who voted against impeachment representative Smithee said the House could not legitimately impeach General Paxton on the record because there was no record to send to the Senate. He said the House was not following the rule of law. He said the House approach, and I quote Representative Smithy, “hang them now and judge them later.”
Confirming this, Representative Murr, the chair of the House investigating committee, said on the House floor the House is not the body that does the fact-finding. The fact finding occurs in the Senate, and the oath for any witnesses would occur there. Well that's just not true, as Representative Smithee said, that's exactly what they did in 1917. He said the last House impeachment of a statewide official in 1917 was governor Ferguson. John Smithee said it was conducted like a full trial before the House sent it to the Senate. Witnesses were put under oath and crossed-examined by the defendant. He said this time no House witnesses were put under oath, and the defendant was denied the right to cross-examine.
Representative Smithee told his fellow members the House process was indefensible. Representative Smithee said the House did not follow the rules of evidence and their case was based on triple hearsay that would never be allowed in court. I think Representative Smithee's speech was one of the most honest and courageous speeches I've ever heard of in the House. And if you want to watch it online, go to YouTube, look up John Smithee. That's s-m-i-t-h-e-e. — his floor speech on the Paxton impeachment. It’s an amazing, courageous speech to give when he knew he was only one of 23 not voting for impeachment.
In the next regular session we should amend the Constitution on the issue of impeachment, as currently written, that allowed this flawed process to happen. Any testimony given in a House impeachment investigation must be given under oath and the target of that impeachment must be allowed to present with a lawyer to cross-examine the witnesses. Otherwise, people can say anything they want without any accountability, or need to be truthful, because there is no threat of perjury. The House must also give members a minimum of two weeks to review all evidence given under oath before voting on such a serious matter. Had they done those two things this trial may never have happened, And when the House sends articles of impeachment to the Senate, if they do in the future, the official should not be put on unpaid leave through the process. The federal system does not allow that. Why do we allow that in Texas? President Clinton and President Trump did not have to step down from the Oval Office, from their duties, during their impeachment process. And members, this is not a partisan issue. We owe it to future legislatures to make these changes so that no future official impeached by the House, whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent, is subject to the way this impeachment process occurred in the House this year.
Millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on this impeachment. 31 senators, and a large Senate staff that made this trial possible, have put their family life, their jobs, their business, on hold for the last three months, after already being here from January to June.
I'm going to call next week for a full audit of all taxpayer money spent by the House, from the beginning of their investigation in March to their final bills they get from their lawyers. We will provide our costs as well, that were forced on us by the House impeachment. One big difference — we didn't pay a huge team of outside lawyers and investigators. We did it mostly with our own staff working endless hours, with no extra pay. As Representative Smithee said, this is not the way it has happened in the past in the House. That's why I believe we've only had two prior impeachments. Our founders expected better. It should have never happened this year, and hopefully it doesn't again. Unless we address this in the Constitution.
And finally members, may God continue to bless the greatest place God ever created on Earth, the place we call Texas. We are the envy of the world. We are the America that all America used to be, and that's why people move here from every state of the union, by the hundreds of thousands every year. Members, each of you took an oath on the Sam Houston Bible on the first day of this trial, and I know no matter how you voted, you lived up to that oath and how you saw the evidence. I thank you again for the professionalism you demonstrated every day for the last three months. I'm honored and I'm proud to serve with you as Lieutenant Governor.