mpeachment is not the most quotable of subjects, but in April 1970,
House Minority Leader Gerald Ford managed to make it so. Spearheading
a doomed attempt to impeach Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas,
Ford famously said that an impeachable offense is "whatever a majority of
the House of Representatives considers to be at a given moment in
history," adding that "conviction results from whatever ... two-thirds of
the [Senate] considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the
accused from office."' This idea is sometimes rendered more simply as
"impeachment is whatever the House of Representatives says it is, and
removal is whatever the Senate says it is."2 Ford's statement has garnered
plenty of criticism over the decades, because it seemingly ignores the
Constitution's definition of impeachable offenses-high crimes and
misdemeanors ("HCMs")-and substitutes Congress's political whim.
