 Hi, my name is Kyle Hudson. I'm at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in the Humanities Department and I'm here to give you a basic introduction to the process of impeachment, the ABCs as it were. Obviously as you know, there's now a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump in the House of Representatives. My job is not to tell you whether or not that's a good idea. I'm sure you have your own ideas about that, given your own political views. Rather, my job today is to give you an overview of the process by looking at the Constitution, looking at the history of impeachment, so that you'll have a stronger sense of how the process is actually going to play out and how it works. If you look at Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 of the Constitution, it states, the House of Representatives shall choose their speaker and other officers and shall have the sole power of impeachment. This is all that the Constitution really says about the House's role, so there's a lot that's left up in the air. We do know, though, that it's the job of the House of Representatives and only the House of Representatives to impeach a president. So that's where the process has to begin. Well, what happens then? If we look at Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6 of the Constitution, we learn more about the role of the Senate. The Constitution tells us that the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside. And no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present. So impeachment doesn't remove the President from office. It's just the first part of a two-step sequence. The House of Representatives impeaches the President. He or she is then put on trial by the Senate with the Chief Justice presiding. And it takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove the President from office. If we go on, the Constitution also tells us in Article 1, Section 3, Clause 7, judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States. But the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law. What this means is that if a President is impeached and then removed from office, he doesn't suffer any criminal penalty. His punishment is being removed from office and possibly disqualified from holding any other further office. Nevertheless, even if a President has been impeached and removed from office, he or she can still then be put on trial by the regular criminal courts and possibly convicted of a crime and assessed some kind of criminal punishment. In addition to whatever removal and disqualification he suffered as a result of impeachment. Now, this is an important part of the Constitution that's relevant for what it doesn't let the President do. This is from Article 2 of the Constitution which concerns the powers of the President. Article 2, Section 2 Clause 1 says, the President shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States except in cases of impeachment. This means that the President of the United States can pardon those who've been convicted of federal crimes but he or she can't pardon anyone who's been impeached and removed from office. What this means is that when a President is removed from office, his or her successor cannot pardon him or her. In other words, can't make the impeachment and removal go away. Once it's been done by Congress, it sticks, there's no reversal. Now, if we go back to Article 1, Section 4, we see that the President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. So we see here that the impeachment process can apply not just to the President but also to the Vice President, although that's never happened, and to all civil officers of the United States. This language has been interpreted to apply to federal judges and most of the impeachments that have occurred over the course of our history have actually concerned federal judges, several of whom have, in fact, been removed from office. Now let's look at Alexander Hamilton, because this notion of high crimes and misdemeanors is rather vague and broad. The Constitution tells us that the President can be impeached and removed from office for treason, for bribery, but it also mentions high crimes and misdemeanors, but doesn't really offer a definition. In the Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton says that impeachment concerns those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may, with peculiar propriety, be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. What Hamilton is getting at is that the notion of high crimes and misdemeanors isn't just limited to crimes that are on the statute books, but may also apply to other misuses of high office. What those high crimes and misdemeanors are and what constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor is ultimately a political question that has always been subject to ferocious debate any time there's been the possibility of a presidential impeachment. So let's now look a little bit at the nuts and bolts of the process. We've already looked at the constitutional language. How does impeachment work? Well, it begins, as we said, in the House of Representatives. The House Judiciary Committee drafts and then votes on articles of impeachment if they choose to. If any of those articles of impeachment, which are formal accusations of presidential wrongdoing, pass the House Judiciary Committee, then they proceed to the full House. The full House votes on them and can approve them with a simple majority. If the House does, in fact, vote by a simple majority to approve any or all articles of impeachment that have been passed by the House Judiciary Committee, that means that the President has formally been charged by the House with high crimes and misdemeanors. This is akin to indictment by a grand jury. In our criminal system, if you're accused of a crime, you will be brought before a grand jury, which will, if it's convinced that there's probable cause that you've committed a crime, issue an indictment, which is a formal accusation. Once you're indicted, you'll then be put on trial in front of a jury. So we have grand juries and trial juries. In the impeachment process, the House of Representatives functions like a grand jury. It's the body that makes official formal charges of wrongdoing that then have to be placed on trial. That happens in the Senate. If and when the House of Representatives passes articles of impeachment, there is then a trial of the President in the Senate. The Chief Justice presides, coming over from the Supreme Court. There are members of the House of Representatives who are chosen to act as prosecutors. And then the President himself or herself retains lawyers to offer a defense. So the cases argued in front of the Senate and the Senate effectively acts as a trial jury, although a rather unusual one. There are no set rules in the Constitution for how the Senate has to conduct an impeachment trial. So the Senate, at the beginning of one of these trials, adopts resolutions to lay out the procedures that it's going to follow. So the Senate is in a peculiar situation. It's acting like a jury without a trial, but it's also making its own decisions about what kind of evidence will be admitted, what kind of testimony will be allowed. That's not something that a regular trial jury gets to do. So the Senate has a lot of power, not only in ultimately deciding whether or not the President is removed from office, but in setting the ground rules for addressing that question in the first place. One issue that's come up recently is the question of whether the Senate even has to have a trial. Some people have suggested that if the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats, does pass articles of impeachment against President Trump, that the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, might then simply dismiss the charges. Does the Constitution allow this option? The answer really isn't clear. It's been debated by scholars. It seems unlikely that this would happen, but it has been raised as a possibility because the Senate has a lot of power in determining how to conduct a trial once there's been an official impeachment. The Constitution also doesn't give us any guidance about the standard of proof. You've probably heard that in criminal trials in the United States, the prosecution has a very high burden of proof. The prosecution has to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, in civil trials, not criminal trials, that involve, for example, breaches of contract, business disputes, medical malpractice suits, things of that nature, the standard of proof is lower. The prosecution still has the burden of proving that the plaintiff, the person who brought the case, deserves to get damages, some kind of compensation from the defendant. But in a civil case, typically the standard of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence. So, for example, if you're on the jury and you're 51 percent sure that I violated my contract with someone, then you can find me guilty. So those are different standards of proof. In the case of impeachment and removal from office, the Constitution really doesn't give us any explicit guidance about the standard of proof. What this effectively means is that each senator acts as his or her own judge of what standard of proof should be required for his or her vote in favor of removing the president from office. So the Senate as an institution has a lot of power in this process, and individual senators also have a great deal of power. It is difficult to remove a president, even if he or she has been accused by the House of committing impeachable offenses, the Senate can remove a president from office only by a supermajority. A two-thirds vote is required. That's why a lot of people have suggested that even if President Trump is impeached, it's very likely that the Senate, in which Republicans now hold a majority, would come anywhere near a two-thirds vote to remove him from office. Now, if the Senate does vote to remove a president from office, that means that he has to leave office. There's no appeal. The vice president immediately becomes president. And as I said earlier, the president could, doesn't have to be, but could later be indicted, could be officially charged with crimes and potentially found guilty of those in a criminal trial and find their sentence to imprisonment. Again, the notion of high crimes and misdemeanors is very broad. It encompasses the political, not the legal. It doesn't just include traditionally crimes like treason or bribery, but it also includes what in the judgment of the House of Representatives and the Senate constitutes abuses of presidential power. So let's review where we are now. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has announced a formal impeachment inquiry and there's a scholarly debate over whether that actually gives the House more power than it would have anyway. Some people have suggested that it doesn't give the House any more power than it would normally have to subpoena documents or to compel testimony. Other scholars argue that the fact that there's now a formal impeachment inquiry does in fact give the House of Representatives greater power to require people to testify or to require the administration to turn over various sorts of documents. In this case, there was no official vote by the full House to begin an impeachment inquiry. The Speaker simply said, we have begun a formal impeachment inquiry. That's unlike what happened in the cases of Presidents Nixon and Clinton. In both of those cases, the full membership of the House of Representatives voted formally to open a House inquiry. Now, there's nothing in the Constitution that says you have to do that, but that has been done in the past. Democrats are saying that the Constitution doesn't require any formal vote to make an inquiry official. The White House, on the other hand, is saying that because there's been no formal vote, there isn't really an official inquiry. And the White House has said that might justify not cooperating with certain requests from congressional committees. Nevertheless, there is an investigation going on. And in fact, there are six different committees in the House of Representatives that are currently investigating various aspects of the administration. Those are the Judiciary Committee, Intelligence, Oversight and Reform, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services and Ways and Means. They are now conducting investigations. They are subpoenaing documents. They are compelling people to come testify to them. That's been going on even today. What will happen is after these hearings and investigations are wrapped up, these six committees will forward their findings to the House Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee will then decide whether to draft articles of impeachment and whether to pass any of them and pass them along to the full House. Now let's talk a little bit about history. There's no United States president who's ever been impeached and removed from office. There are, however, two who have been impeached and three against whom impeachment proceedings were initiated. The first is Andrew Johnson in 1868. When President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Vice President Johnson, who was born here in North Carolina in Raleigh, became president. And Vice President and then President Johnson had a very different view from that of the so-called radical Republicans who controlled the Congress. The radical Republicans in Congress wanted to take a very strong hand during Reconstruction after the Civil War. They wanted to be very aggressive in remaking Southern society and guaranteeing rights for the newly freed slaves. Johnson had a much narrower view of what should happen during Reconstruction. He didn't want to go nearly as far in punishing or remaking the South. And he didn't want to go nearly as far in giving rights to the former slaves. This led to a break between President Johnson and Congress. And Edwin Stanton was involved in this break. He was the secretary of war. Johnson had inherited him from Lincoln's cabinet. And as the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton had a very important role to play in Reconstruction because the military was still occupying the conquered South and so much of Reconstruction took place through the military. Well, the radical Republicans in Congress knew that President Johnson wanted to fire Secretary Stanton and they wanted to protect him. So they passed a law called the Tenure of Office Act. And the Tenure of Office Act said that if the president wants to fire a member of the cabinet, he has to have the permission of Congress. Now, President Johnson thought this change in the relationship of powers between the executive and the legislative was unconstitutional. And in fact, most modern legal scholars, regardless of their politics, agree. Nevertheless, at the time Congress passed this law, Johnson took the bait. He promptly violated it. He fired Edwin Stanton. And for that and other reasons, he was impeached by the House of Representatives. The Articles of Impeachment, though, didn't just accuse him of violating the Tenure of Office Act. They also said that by his behavior, he had brought both Congress and the presidency into disgrace and ridicule. So you can see here that the idea of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors is broader than the criminal law. It's generally not a criminal act to bring yourself or others into disgrace and ridicule, but if you're the president, Congress may well decide that doing so constitutes impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. Well, Johnson was, in fact, impeached the House of Representatives past 11 Articles of Impeachment. There was a trial in the Senate and the Senate came one vote short of convicting Johnson and removing him from office. So Johnson survived, but he became a political non-entity. 1868, the year when he was impeached was an election year. Neither party re-nominated him for president. He had to go back to Tennessee. So even though he remained president for a short period of time, he was essentially powerless after this happened. So Johnson was impeached, but was not removed from office. Now, there's also the case in 1974 of President Richard Nixon. This is rooted in the so-called Watergate scandal. In the summer of 1972, five men were discovered breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which was located in the Watergate, a set of offices, hotels and condominium buildings in Washington, D.C. The question arose whether and to what extent the White House had actually been involved in this attempt to burglarize and place listening devices in the headquarters of the opposition Democratic Party. So over the next two years, there was a great deal of investigation by journalists, by the FBI, by a federal grand jury, and by a special committee in the United States Senate that was actually headed by North Carolina's Democratic Senator Sam Irvin, who became famous as a result of his role in these hearings. It eventually came to light that President Nixon had taped his conversations in the Oval Office. Various committees and juries demanded that President Nixon turn over those tapes. They issued subpoenas. The president refused, citing executive privilege. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the case of United States versus Nixon, the Supreme Court told President Nixon that he had to turn over the tapes. Well, by the time the tapes were released, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives had already voted to approve three articles of impeachment against President Nixon. They accused him of obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. After these articles of impeachment were voted on by the House Judiciary Committee, but before they could be voted on by the full House of Representatives, Nixon's tapes were released. And among those was the so-called smoking gun tape, a tape of a conversation between President Nixon and one of his advisors, in which he speculated about ways to impede the investigation. This was viewed as providing clear evidence of obstruction of justice. A group of Republican senators went to the White House. They informed the president that unless he resigned from office, he would definitely be impeached by the House. He would definitely be removed from office by the Senate. So President Nixon went ahead and resigned as president, the first and only president of the United States to resign in order to avoid being impeached and removed from office. And in fact, he later avoided any criminal trial because before he could be brought to trial, his successor, Gerald Ford, issued him a pardon for any of and all crimes that might have been connected with the Watergate scandal. So Nixon was in the process of being impeached, but he was never impeached by the full House, not removed from office by the Senate, rather he resigned. If he hadn't resigned, though, he would have become almost certainly the second president after Johnson to be impeached and removed from office. Now, in 1998, there was the case of Bill Clinton. There had been a lengthy investigation into President Clinton's finances. He had been involved in a real estate development in his home state of Arkansas called Whitewater. There was a lengthy investigation of whether there had been any financial improprieties in the course of these investments. And the investigation brought him and began to look into other questions about President Clinton's behavior. President Clinton had been sued for sexual harassment by a woman named Paula Jones, who was a state employee in Arkansas. She claimed that he had behaved inappropriately toward her while he was governor of Arkansas. So as a part of this lawsuit, the president had to be deposed. In most lawsuits, before a witness actually testifies in court, there's what's called a deposition. You sit down with lawyers, you're placed under oath. You have to answer questions for the record. So when President Clinton was deposed under oath, he was asked by the lawyers for Paula Jones whether he had engaged in sexual behavior with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The president said, no, there later came to light evidence indicating that, in fact, the president may well have lied about this and committed perjury under oath. There were arguments back and forth of a rather embarrassing nature that I won't get into in this format about whether what the president may or may not have done qualified as a quote-unquote sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. Nevertheless, the House of Representatives, which at that time was controlled by Republicans, voted to impeach President Clinton. They voted in favor of two articles of impeachment for perjury that is lying under oath and obstruction of justice. So Clinton's case went to the Senate. There was a trial. The Chief Justice presided. But the Senate never came close to the two-thirds vote necessary to remove Clinton from office. So Clinton remained in office for another two years, remained fairly popular until he left office in 2001. So we've had three presidents who were in the situation, two who were actually impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, one who was about to be impeached, Richard Nixon. But we've never had a president remove from office. Now we're in a situation where it looks like President Trump may well be impeached. If he is, there will be a trial in the Senate. And of course, people are very interested in this, not only in the politics of it, but also in the process, which can be very confusing. So I hope what I've shared with you today has been helpful in explaining to you some of the ABCs and the nuts and bolts of how this process works. So thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk with you. And I hope that you'll continue, regardless of your political views, to be attentive citizens. Thank you.