High Crimes
When Thomas Jefferson took office on March 4, 1801, he inherited a hostile judiciary. Predecessors George Washington and John Adams had packed the federal bench with jurists whose views clashed sharply with the new president’s. Jefferson particularly chafed at the enthusiasm with which these Federalist judges had enforced the Sedition Act, which had outlawed criticism of the government. Jefferson wanted to remove these conservative judges and replace them with jurists sharing his far more liberal views—but how?
Federal judges serve for life. Like presidents, these officeholders can be removed only by impeachment, a process the Constitution limits to individuals the Senate finds to have committed treason, bribery, or “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The judges so vexing to Jefferson were rabid partisans who had flaunted their politics in the courtroom. However, none had engaged in criminal conduct. Impeachment and removal would hinge on whether the term “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” includes non-criminal conduct. As Jefferson soon learned, there was—and is—no simple answer.
The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution the United States needed a means of ousting federal officials found to have abused their positions. The delegates, having endured the rule of an unremovable British monarch, at first focused on impeachment of an errant president. “Should any man be above Justice?” asked George Mason of Virginia. “Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?” Without a vehicle for peaceable removal of the chief executive, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania noted, the recourse could be violence. If that occurred, said Edmund J. Randolph of Virginia, the result would be “tumults & insurrections.” Delegates saw impeachment proceedings as a high-reward/low-risk proposition. “A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them,” said Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Realizing that holders of other governmental positions might abuse their positions, the delegates expanded the list of officials subject to impeachment from the president alone to the “President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States.”
