Better Know Your Impeachment Process: Black & Bobbitt, Pt. 1

Better know your impeachment process episode # . . . whatever.

Today I'm going to start sharing quotes from some of the outstanding legal scholars who have addressed the topic of impeachment. I'll start with "Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition," by Charles Black (1974) & Phillip Bobbitt (2018). The late Charles Black was an outstanding constitutional scholar back when I was in law school. He wrote the original edition of this book in 1974, as Richard Nixon was nearing impeachment (he resigned before he was actually impeached). In 2018, constitutional scholar Phillip Bobbitt (Columbia) updated Black's work, keeping Black's original text intact but updating in light of the Clinton impeachment and other legal developments. I'll regularly share pertinent quotes from this & other works to allow readers to get an overview of the parameters of the impeachment process from some of the best minds who've written on the topic.

The following is a quote from Black's original 1974; thus, the "I" is Black and the president to whom he refers is Richard Nixon:

To countervail (as I hope) my lifelong political set against just about all of this president’s positions, I confess to a very strong sense of the dreadfulness of the step of removal, of the deep wounding such a step must inflict on the country, and thus approach it as one would approach high-risk major surgery, to be resorted to only when the rightness of diagnosis and treatment is sure.

Black, Charles L. Jr.. Impeachment (p. 4). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Black next considers the role of we citizens in this process. Read & consider his words carefully:

This book is for the citizen. What part ought the citizen to play in the process of impeachment and removal? My own answer would be that, for the most part, our attitude as to any impeachment ought to be that of vigilant waiting. The impeachment process, whether “judicial,” “nonjudicial,” “criminal,” or “noncriminal,” resembles the judicial criminal procedure in that it is confided by the Constitution to responsible tribunals—the House of Representatives and the Senate—and in that these bodies are duty-bound to act on their own views of the law and the facts, as free as may be of partisan political motives and pressures. In this process, a snow of telegrams ought to play no part.

Id., p. 5.