who remembers the scenario that forced Richard Nixon to resign?

[John1956PA]

18. Nowadays, the right-wingers are lobbing grenades into the hen house.

Thank you for your kind reply.

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s, impeachment of a president was unthinkable. Before Watergate, those of us high school students who learned of the 1868 Andrew Johnson impeachment came away from that lesson with the opinion that the event was a quirky footnote in history and would never be repeated. Up until Watergate, both parties tacitly agreed that any impeachment of a president would be an exercise in political muscle on both sides. After all, what president could serve without committing some infraction which, in some lawyerly argument, could be said to be a "misdemeanor"? The thinking of the politicians was akin to Mutual Assured Destruction mentality. Everyone thought that, if the impeachment football were to allowed to become commonplace, neither side would be safe. As a corollary, the parties' unwritten rule was to take no action to challenge the outcome of a national election. Hence, it is said, the R's did not seek a recount of the Illinois votes in the 1960 election.

Watergate was a sea-change in the attitude of many politicians towards resorting to the impeachment process. The Clinton impeachment was a follow-through on that new attitude. In fact, in 1998, some pundits opined that the Clinton impeachment was, in the minds of some R's, suitable retaliation for the Democrats' pursuit of Nixon in Watergate.

Alarmingly, today's right-winger pols and their low-information admirers throw the "impeachment" word (and incarceration terminology) at their political opponents to vent their hate and to score political points. Politics, which to the public used to be akin to a harmless parlor game, has become more of a violent computer game. During this past campaign, Hillary haters spewed the nonsense that, on the grounds of her past emailing practices, she would be impeached if she won the election. Lost on those hate mongers was the premise that impeachable offenses apply to high crimes and misdemeanors committed while the president is in office.

If the impeachment process, or even the threat of it, become the norm, our government will be gridlocked.