What is impeachment? It is the process the Constitution gives Congress to formally charge a federal official with serious wrongdoing and, if the charges hold up at a trial, remove that person from office.
Impeachment is often misunderstood as removal itself, but it is only the first half. When the House of Representatives impeaches someone, it is voting to accuse them, much like a grand jury indicting someone in a criminal case. The accusation is written up in documents called articles of impeachment, and each article describes one charge. The House needs a simple majority, which means more than half of the members voting, to approve them.
The second half happens in the Senate, which holds the trial. House members act as prosecutors, the official being tried has a defense team, and senators serve as the jury. When the president is on trial, the chief justice of the Supreme Court presides. To convict and remove someone, two thirds of the senators present must vote guilty, which is 67 votes if all 100 senators are there. If the Senate convicts, it can also hold a separate vote, which needs only a majority, to bar that person from ever holding federal office again. If the Senate does not reach two thirds, the person is acquitted and stays in office.
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The Constitution says the president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States can be impeached for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. That last phrase is not defined, and Congress has always had to decide for itself what counts. Civil officers include cabinet secretaries and federal judges. Members of Congress are not impeached. Each chamber can expel its own members instead.
Any House member can start the process by introducing an impeachment resolution. Most of them go nowhere, because party leaders control which bills get a vote. A member can, however, offer a resolution as privileged, a House rule that moves it ahead of regular business and forces the chamber to deal with it quickly. Leaders still have options, including a motion to table, which is a vote to set the measure aside without debating it. Usually the House Judiciary Committee investigates first, holds hearings and votes on whether to send articles to the full House.
History shows how hard removal is. Presidents have been impeached four times: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019 and again in 2021. The Senate acquitted every one of them, so no president has ever been removed through impeachment. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before the full House voted. Cabinet officials have faced it too. In 2024 the House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the Senate dismissed the charges after a short proceeding. Federal judges are the officials most often removed. The Federal Judicial Center, the research arm of the federal courts, counts 15 judges impeached and eight of them convicted.
So what is impeachment in practice? It is both a legal process and a political one. Because the House and Senate are made up of elected politicians, the outcome often follows party lines, and the two thirds bar in the Senate means conviction usually requires members of the official’s own party to join in. That is why the threat of impeachment can matter even when conviction is unlikely. It can force public hearings, create a formal record of the charges and put members on record with their votes ahead of the next election.
For everyday life, impeachment is one of the few tools voters indirectly hold over the most powerful people in government. The people deciding are the House members and senators you elect, so who controls each chamber determines whether an impeachment can pass the House at all and how likely a conviction is. When you see a headline about an impeachment vote, the questions to ask are which stage it is at, whether a majority exists in the House, and whether anyone in the Senate would cross party lines.
