Commentary
What we are witnessing in this roll-out of very questionable and even spurious indictments of former President Trump is a systematic abuse of the Constitution to which both parties have become addicted.
In the first 190 years of its history, the only impeachment of a president of the United States was of Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was an entirely partisan move against Johnson, a Tennessean and the only southern U.S. senator who remained loyal to the Union following the outbreak of the Civil War. Lincoln selected him to rally loyalist Democratic votes in his re-election campaign and re-christened the Republican Party the National Union Party, a change whose credibility rested largely on Johnson as his second vice president. Following the assassination of President Lincoln, the Republican militants who wanted to punish the South and treat the whole former Confederacy as traitors except for the emancipated slaves, overran sensible opinion and impeached Johnson for exercising his right to fire a cabinet secretary for insubordination. The law that was invoked for the impeachment was ultimately determined to be unconstitutional, and Johnson survived by only one vote in the Senate….