To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment

Tribe (Carl M. Loeb Univ. Professor & constitutional law, Harvard Univ.) has again partnered with constitutional lawyer Matz (they previously collaborated on Uncertain Justice) to provide a legal analysis of the power of impeachment. Perhaps now more than ever, the United States is grappling at the question of when and how an American president can be removed from office, and this duo works to provide the historical and political backgrounds of the process. While impeachment became part of the political system as a way of providing a check on executive power, impeaching a president, as the authors posit, will likely result in significant national trauma. The authors focus on three aspects to consider regarding impeachment—is removal permissible, is removal likely to succeed, and is removal worth the cost to the nation? Tribe and Matz bridge the gap between the legal and political considerations of impeachment, shedding new light on an often discussed but little researched topic of civil discourse.