I would like to encourage a discussion of impeachment.

Not, I want to stress, impeachment of President Bush.

Rather a discussion of the concept of impeachment and its appropriate role in the operation of our government.

Under Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution, "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Most of us have a pretty clear idea of the definition of treason or bribery. But most of us, including me, might like to ask: What are "high crimes and misdemeanors"?

The terms came to us from England, where in the era in which our Constitution was written the House of Commons could and did impeach officers of the Crown and try them in the House of Lords. The preponderance of evidence indicates the terms did not connote major violations of laws applicable to all citizens for which suspects could be arrested, tried, and sent to prison, but rather applied to public officials who breached their trust and endangered the kingdom, perhaps in ways which were not actually illegal.

In 1970, when he was minority leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford said an impeachable offense is "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." A fairly accurate statement, I suggest.

A president or any federal official can be impeached by a majority vote of the House. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. And, more than once, the Supreme Court has ruled the outcome cannot be appealed.

I yield to no one in my veneration of the Constitution of the United States as the greatest charter of freedom ever penned, but there is no question the founding fathers, as a condition for getting a constitution, had to accept certain compromises (between large states and small states as well as between slave states and free states) with which we are still struggling, and had to adopt some intentionally imprecise language whose meaning is still in dispute.

Compromise and imprecision helped shape the impeachment concept contained in the Constitution.

A healthy majority of delegates believed in the idea of three independent branches of government, but quite a few delegates were worried about how to save the country from a headstrong president who might stretch his powers beyond their constitutional limits, defy Congress and act in a way clearly dangerous to the nation. So they turned to the British example of impeachment with which they were familiar and inserted it into the Constitution.

In the Federalist Papers, No. 65, Alexander Hamilton described as within the scope of impeachment: "those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

A delegate to the North Carolina constitutional convention argued that the president: "must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate. (It) is his duty to impart to the Senate every material intelligence he receives. If it should appear that he has not given them full information, but has concealed important intelligence which he ought to have communicated, and by that means induced them to enter into measures injurious to their country, and which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them," impeachment would be in order.

The fact that statement perhaps has some contemporary application is coincidental and I will not expand upon it.

In our more than two centuries as a nation, the House has impeached only two presidents -- Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. The Senate failed to convict Johnson by a margin of one vote and Clinton by a margin of 17 votes. The House judiciary committee voted to impeach Richard Nixon, but he resigned before the full House acted.

In the Clinton case, House Republicans acted, knowing full well there was no chance of a conviction in the Senate, but hoping to hobble and embarrass Clinton. They certainly distracted his attention from most presidential duties for a year, but he left office with a 68 percent approval rating in opinion polls.

In the Johnson and Nixon cases, the House acted, I believe, out of conviction that the actions of both reached the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" dangerous to the nation's future well-being.

The discussion I would like to encourage involves two questions:

Is the power of impeachment still a vital part in the operation of free government under the Constitution?

In the year 2007, what is a viable definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors?"

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