HISTORIANS IN DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTION
As historians as well as citizens, we deplore the present drive to
impeach the President. We believe that this drive, if successful,
will have the most serious implications for our constitutional
order.
Under our Constitution, impeachment of the President is a grave and
momentous step. The Framers explicitly reserved that step for high
crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power.
Impeachment for anything less would accordingly leave the president
to "serve at the pleasure of the Senate," thereby mangling the system
of balances that is our chief safeguard against abuses of public
power.
Although we do not condone President Clinton's private behavior or
his subsequent attempts to deceive, the current charges against him
depart from what the Framers saw as grounds for impeachment. The vote
of the House of representatives to conduct an open-ended inquiry
creates a novel all-purpose search for offenses by which to remove a
President from office.
The theory of impeachment underlying these efforts is unprecedented
in our history. The new processes are extremely ominous for the
future of our political institutions. If carried forward, they will
derange the balance of power arrange by the Constitution and will
leave the Presidency permanently disfigured and diminished, at the
mercy as never before of any Congress. Any majority in the House
of Representatives will be able to use scandal-mongering against any
President to meet the lowered impeachment bar. The Presidency,
historically the center of leadership during our great national
ordeals, will be crippled in facing the inevitable challenges of
the future.
On November 3 the country faces a choice between preserving or
undermining our Constitution. Do we want to establish a precedent for
the future harassment of presidents and to tie up our government with
a protracted national agony or to get back to the national business.
We urge you, whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, or an
Independent, to oppose the dangerous new theory of impeachment, and
to demand the restoration of the normal operations of our federal
government.
As of noon, Thursday, October 22, more than 400 historians from every part of the United States have signed this statement. The signatories include:
C. Vann Woodward, Yale University
James M. McPherson, Princeton University
David Donald, Harvard University
Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University
Joseph Ellis, Mount Holyoke College
Edward Ayres, University of Virginia
David Kennedy, Stanford University
Henry Louis Gates, Harvard University
Drew Gilpin Faust, University of Pennsylvania
George Fredrickson, Stanford University
Linda Gordon, University of Wisconsin
Jack Rakove, Stanford University
David Brion Davis, Yale University
Carl Degler, Stanford University
John Hope Franklin, Duke University
Robert Dallek, Boston University
Hugh Davis Graham, Vanderbilt University
Gerda Lerner, University of Wisconsin
John Morton Blum, Yale University
Taylor Branch, Goucher College
Co-sponsors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., City University of New York
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University