The Treaty of Dover

This secret treaty with Louis XIV in 1670 promised Charles II 200,000 pounds a year, the withdrawal of England from the Protestant coalition of Sweden and Netherlands against France, the relaxation of restrictive laws against Catholics and gradual return of England to Catholicism.

It was with this in mind and concern about the more recent extortion against native rulers in India by the British governor Warren Hastings that the framers took up the question of removing Federal officials from office.

George Mason suggested that "maladministration" be added to treason and bribery as a reason for impeaching a president.

James Madison argued that this language was too vague and would make the term of the president "... equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate." Mason agreed and substituted "high crimes and misdemeanors against the state."

The convention delegates accepted this proposal, revising it only to read: "high crimes and misdemeanors against the United States" in order, as they said, "to remove ambiguity."

Once the substance of the Constitution had been agreed upon, a Committee on Style set to work to smooth out the language. Ironically, it was from the Committee's editing of the clause that was amended "to remove ambiguity," that the ambiguity that plagued the debate over the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton in 1998-99 arose. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Committee on Style omitted the last four words from the Mason amendment that had been passed by the Convention. Throughout the proceedings, the delegates were clearly concerned with providing a means of removing a Federal official who had used his office to betray the country or usurp power in the manner of Charles II or Warren Hastings. They were not concerned with personal conduct. But in the rush to end the constitutional convention, no one questioned the abbreviation of the clause defining impeachment, creating the potential for precisely the kind of situation in 1999 that James Madison, 212 years earlier had tried to avoid.

This discussion was substantially drawn from, John K. Alexander and Richard T. Cooper, "The Impeachment Debate: 'High Crimes, Misdemeanors': A Yardstick Whittled by History," Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1998, A. 36.