Why clinton impeached

But in the '90s, given the number of Democrats in the Senate, the effort against Clinton was unlikely ever to succeed. There is an extremely high bar to remove a president from office. Twelve Senate Democrats would have had to turn on Clinton to put him in danger of conviction.

Zero ultimately did, because Clinton never lost the support of his party. How a land deal inquiry became a sex scandal. The Clinton impeachment turned on a salacious scandal that featured the President caught in a lie about his extramarital affair with an intern at the White House.

It helped launch the country into an era of hyper-partisanship has only amplified under Trump. While Clinton's lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky might be the most memorable part of the impeachment, that was not where it all started.

Clinton had been under investigation by an independent counsel almost from the moment he took office, when he appointed an independent counsel to conduct an inquiry into a land deal he and his wife conducted long before he took office. How Trump's impeachment stacks up, in four charts. From there, the counsel had grown and expanded and looked into other elements of the Clinton presidency.

A panel of judges replaced the first Clinton independent counsel with Ken Starr in It was Starr who ultimately expanded his investigation to include a possible affair by the President after he was approached by Linda Tripp, a former White House secretary who had befriended Lewinsky and then recorded their phone conversations.

The other Clinton sex scandal. In the midst of the Starr investigation, Clinton was also accused of sexual misconduct in a lawsuit by Paula Jones, a former employee for the Arkansas state government.

Jones had sued Clinton in for sexual harassment and it set off a years-long legal battle that included an important Supreme Court decision in that made clear a President could face a civil lawsuit while in office. It was as part of that case that Clinton was asked during a grand jury proceeding about the Lewinsky affair. Starr then sent his report to the House of Representatives alleging that there were grounds for impeaching Clinton for lying under oath, obstruction of justice, abuse of powers, and other offenses.

After a vitriolic series of televised House hearings and the release of thousands of documents—many in graphic detail—the House Judiciary Committee, on a strictly partisan vote, recommended that an impeachment inquiry commence.

The House adopted two articles of impeachment, charging the President with perjury in his grand jury testimony and obstructing justice in his dealings with various potential witnesses. The Senate, charged under the Constitution with judging the evidence, opened its trial in mid-January It became immediately clear that the Senate would not produce a two-thirds majority vote to convict Clinton and remove him from office.

Those voting against impeachment argued that the President's actions constituted "low" and tawdry actions involving private matters, not "high crimes and misdemeanors" amounting to offenses against the state. Those voting against Clinton argued that even in private matters, a President who commits perjury and obstructs justice is subverting the rule of law, and that subversion becomes a "high crime. On the first, 45 Republican senators voted to convict while 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted for acquittal.

On the second article of obstruction of justice, 50 Republicans voted for conviction while 45 Democrats and 5 Republicans voted for acquittal. Thus, the second President to have been impeached in U. In the process of pursuing an impeachment of the president, the Republicans had seriously overplayed their hand.

An indication of what lay ahead came when the party actually lost five seats in the House while gaining no Senate seats in the November elections conducted just prior to the impeachment vote. Traditionally, the opposition party registers significant gains in the off-year elections of a President's second term, and so the Republican loss was virtually unprecedented. As the impeachment process unfolded, Clinton's ratings in public opinion polls were at an all-time high, hovering at close to 70 percent.

Most Americans gave Clinton low marks for character and honesty. But, they gave him high marks for performance and wanted him censured and condemned for his conduct, but not impeached and removed. Many viewed key Republican attackers as mean-spirited extremists willing to use a personal scandal for partisan goals. On August 6, Lewinsky appeared before the grand jury to begin her testimony, and on August 17 President Clinton testified.

Contrary to his testimony in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, President Clinton acknowledged to prosecutors from the office of the independent counsel that he had had an extramarital affair with Ms. In four hours of closed-door testimony, conducted in the Map Room of the White House, Clinton spoke live via closed-circuit television to a grand jury in a nearby federal courthouse.

He was the first sitting president ever to testify before a grand jury investigating his conduct. That evening, President Clinton also gave a four-minute televised address to the nation in which he admitted he had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky. Less than a month later, on September 9, Kenneth Starr submitted his report and 18 boxes of supporting documents to the House of Representatives.

Released to the public two days later, the Starr Report outlined a case for impeaching Clinton on 11 grounds, including perjury, obstruction of justice, witness-tampering, and abuse of power, and also provided explicit details of the sexual relationship between the president and Ms. On October 8, the House authorized a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry, and on December 11, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment.

On December 19, the House impeached Clinton. On January 7, , in a congressional procedure not seen since the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson , the trial of President Clinton got underway in the Senate. As instructed in Article 1 of the U. Constitution , the chief justice of the U.

Supreme Court William Rehnquist at this time was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors. Five weeks later, on February 12, the Senate voted on whether to remove Clinton from office. The president was acquitted on both articles of impeachment.

The prosecution needed a two-thirds majority to convict but failed to achieve even a bare majority. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Dickens was born in and attended school in Portsmouth.