By Frank Bowman

I’ve been largely absent from this space for the last few months pushing to finish my book on impeachment.  My able research assistant and indefatigable blog co-author Sam Crosby has been keeping things going here in my absence.  I’m happy to report that the manuscript is done, off to the publisher, and that my long-suffering wife is no longer, as she puts it, a book widow.

The book, to be published in the spring by Cambridge University Press, is titled — High Crimes & Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump.  Although it is scarcely the only work on the subject to appear in this distressed season, it offers something rather different than the other books rushed to press in 2018.  I’ve gone back to the origins of impeachment in medieval England and meticulously examined the whole development of the mechanism in Great Britain, pre-1787 America, in the founding era, and thereafter (including detailed chapters on the impeachments or near-impeachments of Presidents Andrew Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton) to develop what I think is a comprehensive and historically supported theory of the proper scope of presidential impeachment.  Chapters 11-14 consider particular grounds for impeachment of possible relevance in the case of Mr. Trump.  Chapter 16 lays out the case for and against doing just that.

When the book is released, I will shamelessly shout it from the rooftops.  In the meantime, I will undoubtedly refer to some of its conclusions here.