The House Judiciary Committee began debating articles of impeachment against President Richard Milhous Nixon on the evening of July 24, 1974. In his introductory remarks, the committee chairman, Peter Rodino, a New Jersey congressman who had become a national figure during seven months of impeachment proceedings, said he had been guided throughout by “the principle that the law must deal fairly with every man.” Rodino called this “the oldest principle of democracy” and implored each member of the committee to “act with the wisdom that compels us in the end to be but decent men who seek only the truth.” Shortly afterward, Harold Donohue, a Massachusetts Democrat, moved that the committee “report to the House a resolution together with articles of impeachment, impeaching Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States.”
By this point, the members had sat through eleven weeks of closed hearings. The committee’s staff had summarized the evidence against the President in several dozen thick black notebooks. The President’s approval ratings had sagged to about twenty-five per cent, and a majority of Americans supported impeachment. Nevertheless, most Republicans on the committee refused to abandon the President. “The closer President Nixon comes to impeachment, the louder his supporters proclaim his innocence,” James Reston wrote, in the Times. “If you say he is innocent often enough, maybe you can make people believe it.”
At the time, these members’ defense of Nixon seemed desperate and futile. Decades later, and long after many of their congressional careers had ended, their support for Nixon would continue to linger over their legacies, an inalterable epitaph. It was the leading item in almost all of their obituaries, if not in the headline. From the Times, on August 27, 1985: “Ex-Rep. Charles Sandman, Nixon Supporter, Dies.” From the Times, on May 22, 1991: “Former Rep. Joseph Maraziti, 78, Defender of Nixon on Watergate.” From the Times, on March 8, 2000: “Charles Wiggins, 72, Dies; Led Nixon’s Defense in Hearings.” From the Los Angeles Times, on June 6, 2007: “Wiley Mayne, 90; House GOP Member Who Voted Not to Impeach Nixon.”
This week, as the current Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings on President Donald Trump, these obituaries might serve as a reminder to the committee’s Republican members that the consequences of their decisions in the coming days will likely extend far beyond the next election. The Judiciary Committee debate on articles of impeachment against Nixon lasted six days. The tone of the hearings was at times soaring and at other moments opaque––alternately invoking the nation’s highest ideals, the fine-grained details of the accusations against the President, and the arcana of legal standards and legislative proceedings. But the significance was clear throughout. “This is no ordinary set of speeches,” Elizabeth Drew wrote, for The New Yorker. “It is the most extraordinary political debate I have ever heard––perhaps the most extraordinary since the Constitutional Convention. And perhaps the most important political debate since that one. These people are drawing on history, attaching themselves to it, and becoming part of it.”
Charles Wiggins, who represented a region in Southern California that overlapped with Nixon’s former congressional district, would emerge as the most articulate and forceful defender of the President during the hearings. He dismissed the notebooks of evidence accumulated by the committee’s staff. “My guess,” he said, “you can put all of the admissible evidence in half of one book. Most of this is just material. It is not evidence, and it may never surface in the Senate because it is not admissible evidence. Simple theories, of course, are inadequate. That is not evidence. A supposition, however persuasive, is not evidence. A bare possibility that something might have happened is not evidence.”
Narrowing the evidence as much as possible against the President became a central strategy for Nixon stalwarts. “If we bring this case and carry it through the House and into the Senate, we will have to prove it,” David Dennis, an Indiana Republican, said. “We will have to prove it by competent evidence. The managers on the part of the House will have to make the case. At that point, hearsay will not do, inference upon inference will not do. Ex parte affidavits will not do. Memoranda will not do. Prior recorded testimony and other legal proceedings to which the President was not a party will not serve.” Charles Sandman, who would be a regular, caustic presence on behalf of Nixon throughout the hearings, said that the Founders had meant for a President to be impeached “only for something extremely serious, which affects his capability to conduct the affairs of the Nation.” Sandman declared that he was not a “nitpicker” and that “there were lots of crimes committed by lots of people, but were they placed at the door of the President?” Sandman did not think so.
When Rodino finally adjourned the hearings, after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, July 30th, the committee had approved three articles of impeachment against the President: for obstructing the investigation into the Watergate break-in, for repeatedly violating the rights of citizens and “impairing the due and proper administration of justice,” and for defying congressional subpoenas. Twenty-one Democrats supported the first two articles. All but two Democrats also voted for the third. Ten out of seventeen Republicans opposed all three articles.
The day before the hearings began, a bipartisan group of moderate lawmakers––four Republicans and three Southern Democrats––had met in secret and resolved to back impeachment. All of them ultimately supported at least one article from the Judiciary Committee, as did three other Republicans. In the years after Watergate, many of these lawmakers would be lionized for their role in the hearings, prioritizing constitutional duty over politics. Only after the release of the so-called smoking-gun tape, which made clear that Nixon had ordered the Watergate coverup, did the ten Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment reverse their decisions. The President resigned three days later.
The makeup of the current Judiciary Committee differs markedly from that of the Nixon era. The Republican minority is now dominated by members of the House Freedom Caucus, the influential conservative faction that has been uncompromising in its defense of Trump. Its most prominent figures include Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who relentlessly undermined witnesses during the Intelligence Committee hearings; Florida’s Matt Gaetz, who, in October, led a brief G.O.P. occupation of the secure room where the Intelligence Committee was conducting its depositions; and Louie Gohmert, of Texas, who has compared impeachment to a “coup” and warned of “civil war.”
Even Republican House members who had been seen as candidates to turn on Trump have thus far sounded more like Nixon’s defenders during Watergate. Will Hurd, the Texas congressman and the only African-American member of the G.O.P. caucus, has often been cited as a possible defector, because of his typically moderate positions and his decision not to seek reëlection next year. But, during the Intelligence Committee hearings last month, he asserted that an impeachable offense should be “compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous,” and that he had not yet heard such evidence. Francis Rooney, of Florida, another retiring congressman who is being closely watched, told Tim Alberta, of Politico, last month, “the whole thing is one step removed from the President.”
In the Senate, it seems at least plausible that frequent Trump dissenters, such as Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins, could form an initial bloc against the President. Could they then be joined by establishment figures, such as the Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, who is retiring, or Rob Portman, of Ohio? What about the senators Cory Gardner and Martha McSally, who are facing tough reëlection fights, in Colorado and Arizona, respectively? These scenarios seem far-fetched, given their statements so far on impeachment, but at least it’s imaginable. What might happen then? Perhaps other Republicans sensitive to history’s long arc will find safety in numbers. Trump would, in all likelihood, still be safe, but he would be tarnished. In American history, the Trump Presidency will inevitably be studied for the ways that democratic norms and institutions have been subverted. Republicans must consider how they wish to be remembered in the narrative of these events. History will have its judgment, too. Legacies exist in the future, but they are forged in the here and now.
