You need to have a more thorough reading and nuance as to what the founding fathers meant to that phrase, as it is debated by the most erudite of legal scholars for decades, and whether you have a Right or Left leaning, ALL agree it is not a simple crime that they are trying to enforce....again, go to law school if you think you are a lawyer.
There are currently two major legal disputes over the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The first is whether or not something in that category actually has to be a crime. Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law and the author of
High Crimes & Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump, tells TIME he believes it doesn’t. “The defenders of the impeached officer always argue, always, that a crime is required,” he says. “And every time that misconception has to be knocked down again.”
He offers this example: “Let’s say the President were to wake up tomorrow morning and says, ‘All this impeachment stuff is kind of getting on my nerves. I think I’m going to go to Barbados for six months. Don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ and just cuts off all contact and refuses to do his duty,” Bowman theorizes. “That’s not a crime. It’s not violating a law. But could we impeach him? Of course we could — otherwise what’s the remedy? We have a country without a President.”
What’s the Constitutional history of the term?
The concept of impeachment was used by the British Parliament as early as 1376, as a legislative safeguard against overreach by the aristocracy, and the terms in question were part of the process early on.
“In England a lot of the impeachment cases had relied on this language of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ from the 1640s onward,” Bernadette Meyler, a law professor at Stanford Law School, explains.
But the phrase didn’t have a set definition in British practice; it was used to describe whatever thing the person was being impeached for, according to Bowman. There were several things for which people were impeached during this era: ordinary crimes, treason, corruption, abuse of power, ordinary incompetence and misbehavior in relation to foreign policy. Notably, the King could not be impeached.
When the framers of the U.S. Constitution realized they needed a way to remove executive officials who abused the nature of their positions, they decided to add a definition for an impeachable offense. Though many suggestions were made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, by the end of the summer they’d winnowed it down to two examples: treason and bribery.
But George Mason of Virginia took issue with limiting it to the two definitions, arguing they were too narrow. At the same time the Constitution was being drafted, newspapers were covering the impeachment of a statesman named Warren Hastings for misconduct during his time the Governor General of India. Mason pointed out that under their current definition, Hasting wouldn’t be impeachable. Mason suggest they broaden the definition to include “maladministration,” meaning mismanagement or ineffective governance. James Madison argued back that the word would be too broad, and make it so the President would be serving at the “pleasure of the Senate.” He worried Senators could remove the President if they disliked a policy move.
George Mason then proposed including the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” instead, and that’s the term they settled on.
To understand what the framers thought “high crimes and misdemeanors” meant, Harvard Law professor Jennifer Taub points to
Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 65, in which he explains the impeachment process. “The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” Hamilton wrote in 1788.
