Your challenge is to have impeachment/removal from office common enough so that a President has to tread extremely carefully if they become unpopular. The more removals, the better.
AHC: Make Impeachment Relatively Common in America
- Thread starter Doctor Evulz
- Start date
The Constitution gives the President even less de jure powers than OTL, while they are still Chief Executive and maintain some power. Congressional supremacy remains throughout the nation's history, and Presidents who step on too many toes in Capitol Hill get the boot.
Eventually someone will just use the army to overthrow the would be impeachers
Andrew Johnson's impeachment was entirely politically motivated and he literally survived by ONE VOTE, so I think that's a good POD. Simple enough. Every subsequent President would be very aware that pissing off a hostile Congress could make them "The Next Johnson Administration". If you get hammered in the mid-terms, better bend over backwards to compromise with the loyal opposition. Imperial Presidency probably reined in to some degree.
Now if we're talking REMOVAL FROM OFFICE being common then yeah, this better be a parliamentary system or something, otherwise....what Anaxagoras & Sevarics said.
Now if we're talking REMOVAL FROM OFFICE being common then yeah, this better be a parliamentary system or something, otherwise....what Anaxagoras & Sevarics said.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Yeah, but he was subverting the will of Congress on Reconstruction. He was dragging his feet every step of the way.
If it had been straightup majority vote in the Senate . . . Johnson is impeached and Reconstruction has a chance of working.
The entire history of my country may have gone better.
Maybe, but I don't think as much as you would hope. What hurt reconstruction more than anything is Southerners were far more interested in keeping Blacks down than Northerners were in enforcing civil rights for Blacks. In the long run the South is going to win via determination.
In Constitution, the list of grounds of impeachments is "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanours".
A George Mason is said to have urged including "maladministration" as a grounds for impeachment, but Hamilton objected.
How likely would it be to get Mason´s "maladministration" into the constitution, so that presidents can be impeached for incompetence/unpopularity, without claiming that these amount to criminal conduct?
A George Mason is said to have urged including "maladministration" as a grounds for impeachment, but Hamilton objected.
How likely would it be to get Mason´s "maladministration" into the constitution, so that presidents can be impeached for incompetence/unpopularity, without claiming that these amount to criminal conduct?
This is the most reasonable comment. It is a good thing for the US that a successful presidential impeachment is virtually impossible. Every impeachment attempt in US history has been at least in part politically motivated, but especially since Iran-Contra it seems that calls for impeachement have been primarily a partisan attempt by the opposition to find some reason to undue the results of the prior election.
If you want to be able to remove a president because he/she makes bad or questionable policy decisions or screws his interns let's amend the US constitution to provide for regular mid-term presidental recall elections or "no-confidence" votes. No, I'm not serious, but this would conform to the notion that the people (presidential electors actually) ought to decide who is president, not congress.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
There's the quote from Hamilton in one of the Federalist papers:
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Sadly, I think that's largely true, but let's try more.
Don't merely keep the troops in for a skimpy 12 years. Keep them in for a generation plus, more like 30 years.
Try and partially win over white Southerners by running effective government. Really try and follow the with charity toward all and malice toward none. Try and have more economic opportunity for both newly freed slaves and longtime southern citizens.
In particular, don't trade away Reconstruction merely for the sake of winning a presidential election.
Sooner or later, the Democrats will win, as they already had in the House in 1874. Even with all blacks voting Republican in the South, the Democrats could still win if the Republicans make a major screw up. (There were 203 D, and 89 R in the House after 1874).
The Democrats could simply block funding for the army, like they did in the aftermath of 1874 (which was caused by the Panic of 1873, something that had nothing to do with Reconstruction).
Once the Democrats were in power, Reconstruction will end, as it did shortly after.
I'm talking about 1874 giving them control of the House, and two years later, it ended.
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GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Okay, in retrospect, looking back with 20/20 hindsight, maybe the mistake was giving the rebellious states representation in Congress so soon after the war they started. How about that?
Nah. It was the Panic of 1873 that led to those losses for the Republicans. And not just in the South. But in the North! PA alone gave 12 seats net change to the Democrats! New York 8 net, Ohio 7, Illinois and Indiana 5, etc.
Even Massachusetts swung to the Democrats for 4 seats!
The Democrats would have won the House even without the South. With the South, if all the whites voted D, and the blacks R, they would still have won because of the Panic of 1873.
Just look at this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1874
The 11 states of the Confederacy has 73 seats. If you remove all those states from the House, and assume that they were all Democrats, it would still result in 130 Democrats and 89 Republicans!
There were 17 Republicans from 11 Southern States, so if you remove them, it would be:
147 Democrats and 72 Republicans
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I actually think the opposite is needed. A weaker president would have less reason to be impeached because Congress could easily overrule him, but a stronger president, whose main check on power is the threat of impeachment and removal, would be more likely to be faced with Congressional opposition.
Also, the removal level needs to be a bare majority as well for this situation to work.
Ancient Athens had a practice of every outgoing leader being put on trial to answer for their actions as executive. You could have the framers put something akin to this in the constitution so instead of it being politically motivated it would be just a constitutional process.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Okay, point well taken.
Now, let me ask you about this. Years ago, a political science book on realignments talked about the Civil War as definitely a realigning time. In the years before the war, there were Conscience Whigs and Cotton Whigs. And the Democrats also split in two factions, with I think one of them being the 'Hunkers,' as in they hunker for political spoils like a nice juicy postmaster appointment. So, I guess I'm asking, over what time range did the Democratic Party lose its idealistic wing and become the defender and justifier of the old South?
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