Abdul Aziz Meslat (International Criminal Court) has posted The Constitutional Architecture of Presidential Impeachment in The United States: Historical Origins, Doctrinal Interpretation, and Institutional Practice on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper examines the constitutional foundations of the presidential impeachment power in the United States. It situates the modern doctrine within its English parliamentary antecedents, the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the ratification debates recorded in The Federalist and the state conventions. It then analyses the enduring interpretive controversy surrounding the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’, tracing the narrow, indictable-offence tradition associated with Raoul Berger against the broader, functional tradition associated with Charles Black, Michael Gerhardt, Frank Bowman, Cass Sunstein, and Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. The paper describes the procedural architecture governing impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate, including the Supreme Court’s holding in Nixon v. United States that the conduct of an impeachment trial is a non-justiciable political question. It reviews, in detail, the four instances in which a President has faced impeachment — Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, impeached twice — and the 1876 impeachment of former Secretary of War William Belknap, the principal precedent bearing on the impeachability of former officers. The paper closes by examining several doctrinal questions that remain unsettled: the constitutionality of ‘late impeachment’, the relationship between impeachment and the ordinary criminal law, and the competing interpretive methodologies that continue to divide constitutional scholars. It concludes that impeachment is properly understood not as a species of criminal adjudication but as a distinct, and deliberately open-textured, constitutional mechanism for the political accountability of high public office.
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