WASHINGTON (AP) The conditions for impeaching a president are set out in a passage of the Constitution that is short enough to be a tweet and puzzling enough to be argued over more than two centuries later.
In 199 characters, the passage, it so happens, also resembles President Donald Trumps Twitter habit of seemingly random capitalization.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Now, as the Democrats are leading only the fourth impeachment inquiry in the nations history, how those words are interpreted in a modern context will determine the fate of Trumps presidency.
Impeachment cases turn on abuse of power, which is a political judgment and one that members of Congress are so far approaching along almost completely partisan lines.
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee opens hearings likely to produce articles of impeachment, akin to an indictment, and set the stage for a Senate trial to determine whether Trump keeps his office.
In mid-November, Democrats escalated their already pitched confrontation with the Republican president by accusing him of a specific crime, bribery, thereby linking his actions to an explicit constitutional standard for impeachment.
Begone with the Latin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, brushing aside weeks of debate over a quid pro quo and alleging a corrupt, criminal act that everyone understands whether they agree it happened or not.
It was a logical move that carried risks, said Cal Jillson, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University.
The impeachment inquiry has entered its public phase, not just with the open hearings, but with a focus by both parties on speaking directly to the public, he said. Hence, the Democrats decided, rightly I think, to ditch the Latin quid pro quo for the modern legal terms bribery and extortion.
But they must be very careful to avoid falling into the Republican trap of assuming that impeachment requires proof of an actual crime it does not.
As if setting that trap just a day earlier, Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, assailed the committees impeachment hearings as nothing more than an impeachment process in search of a crime.
The phrase high crimes and misdemeanors is baffling to modern eyes. Does that mean murder, littering and everything in between? Or nothing in between? What makes a crime a high one? Why would a misdemeanor rise to the level?
Constitutional scholars, steeped in the extensive, four-month record of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, say the catch-all was intended by the framers to make clear that impeachment could be aimed at any consequential abuse of power so long as that abuse hurt the country at large.
Their use of the term was not a cop-out or the result of fatigue, presidential historian Jeffrey A. Engel writes in Impeachment: An American History, a multi-author book on the three impeachment cases of the past and the stirrings of todays case against Trump.
