With Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment secured, House Republicans can now set their sights on President Joe Biden. To this end, Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee recently grilled special counsel Robert Hur regarding his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.

But to understand today’s impeachment dynamics, one must first understand the relevant history. For several decades now, the opposition party in Congress has used impeachment or its threat to undermine duly elected presidents.

Republicans impeached Democrat Bill Clinton in 1998 for his indiscretions with a White House intern and his associated perjury. Clinton’s offenses were real: Having sexual relations with an intern was reckless and beneath the presidency. And lying under oath was technically criminal. But the Republicans’ multiyear, $52 million impeachment spectacle was a ruthlessly disproportionate response.

Two decades later, the Democrats overreached. They wanted to impeach Donald Trump before he even took office. As Emily Jane Fox wrote in Vanity Fair on Dec. 15, 2016, a month before Trump assumed the presidency, “Democrats are paving the way to impeach Donald Trump.”

Again, Trump’s offenses weren’t trivial: pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden was reckless. But Democrats undermined the process from the beginning by transparently obsessing over ousting Trump, rather than finding out what really happened. Many key questions about the underlying events remain unanswered. And a fiercely anti-Trump zealot, Adam Schiff, even ran the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings — feverishly amplifying facts that hurt Trump and minimizing those that helped him.

The Senate acquitted both Clinton and Trump. And neither attempt to remove a sitting president will look good in the eyes of history. Impeachment is a limited Constitutional mechanism that Congress should pursue only with temperance and discretion. Only clear “high crimes and misdemeanors” under the Constitution’s Impeachment Clause should trigger impeachment proceedings. If Congress was respecting the Constitution, then impeachment would be a last resort, not a first impulse. The goal of the proceedings would be to uncover the truth, not manufacture a winning case. And the duly elected president’s legitimacy would be weighed heavily, not simply cast aside.

Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings in the early 1970s show how the system is supposed to work. Nixon was accused of ordering subordinates to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington and steal confidential information. Congress undertook a respectful, bipartisan effort to uncover the truth. They weren’t trying to destroy Nixon or reverse the results of a presidential election. They were, instead, simply trying to figure out what happened. With the evidence mounting against him, Nixon resigned from office.

Then there was Donald Trump’s second impeachment. This time, Trump’s offenses were immense. His sustained effort to reverse the 2020 presidential election results was a “high crime or misdemeanor” under any definition. And significant evidence against him was already public. The only threat to the integrity of the impeachment process was not trying to remove him from office. The contrast with Trump’s first impeachment was stark.

These examples of presidential impeachments put today’s campaign to impeach Biden into perspective. The evidence just isn’t there. The Republicans nonetheless seem poised to add yet another blight on the Impeachment Clause’s checkered history.

The three branches of American government are supposed to check and balance each other, with energy but also with discretion. The separation of powers requires Congress to pursue impeachment only if the president actually commits an impeachable offense. America doesn’t tolerate kings. But nor does it gain from a president under siege.

William Cooper is an attorney and the author of “How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.”

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