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To: gdichaz who wrote (14927)	9/13/1998 12:02:00 AM
From: dougjn	Respond to of 152472

Thank you for the very kind words though we disagree on some things. I think actually Constitutional considerations have had tended to get very important consideration by the Congress in these matters, before all is done. It was Constitutional considerations, and those alone, that saved Justice William O. Douglass from impeachment. He was very unpopular. It was Constitutional considerations alone which saved President Johnson, right after the Civil War, from being impeached by the Radical Republicans. Admittedly Johnson squeeked by by the barest margin possible (one vote as I recall), but it was because a number of the Radical Republicans who were very much opposed to Johnson's policies and his actions, were persuaded by the Constitutional arguments. Though they wanted him out, and thought his actions were immorally soft on the southern states the north had just fought a war to reform, he simply had not committed a Constitional High Crime or Misdemeanor. At that time there were very great policy and moral conflicts at issue. The Radical Republicans felt the north had won a great moral crusade against slavery, and that it was the nation's responsibility to act swiftly and harshly to continue to punish the former slaveholders and raise up the former slaves. They were utterly convinced they were right about issues of the highest national importance. Most of us might very well be inclined to agree with them today on many or all of the policy differences. They wanted to force Southern former slave owners to turn over, as a form of reparations, significant property, plows, horses, etc. to their former slaves. Etc., etc. President Johnson had clearly and unarguable acted in violation of a law the Congress had passed, which prohibited him from firing Cabinet members which the Congress had approved, without the approval of Congress. (He fired someone who was acting dovishly towards the defeated south.) (That act was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but at the time Johnson acted he clearly violated a law.) He was not impeached because in the end his act, though a violation of a law, and though from some points of view a misuse of his office, could not be considered a High Crime or Misdemeanor. (He was not acting outside the traditional authority of Presidents, but in violation of a recently passed, and untested law.) Sure the case was very different, but the point I'm making is Congress in the end didn't feel it should remove him for whatever they felt like, even though they had the pretext of a violation of law. Doug