The country has soured on President Donald Trump, his deportation campaign and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. Recent polls show growing disapproval of how the administration is executing the immigration policy he campaigned on. Though Trump once declared that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing any voters, events in Minneapolis are proving him wrong.
In a midterm year, these events can determine the balance of power in Congress. Sensing the opportunity, House Democrats are threatening to impeach Noem. And sensing the political liability, Trump has warned Republicans that if Democrats retake the House, he will be next. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t,” he told them, “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”
He isn’t concerned, though, about being removed from office. Rather than fearing impeachment, he’s fundraising from it and leaning into the idea to mobilize voters. Political scientists have found that impeachment exacerbates partisanship and carries enormous risks for both parties. As the only person in the nation’s history to have been through the ordeal twice, Trump might be more versed in it than anyone else — and his experience demonstrates just how broken the impeachment process is.
It is a grim paradox of our current moment: The killing of citizens does cost a president voters — but being impeached for it could win some of them back. The result is an overly partisan process that functions more as a tool to influence elections than its intended purpose of holding the executive accountable.
The Constitution grants Congress sole authority to impeach, convict and bar the president and other federal officials from holding office. The House has conducted 22 successful impeachments, including three presidents and two Cabinet secretaries. Eight officials — all judges, no presidents or secretaries — have been found guilty and removed from office by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority. In just the last seven years, there have been three impeachments — two of a president, Trump in 2019 and 2021, and one of a Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024.
Noem, Mayorkas’s successor, is now the center of attention. More than three-fourths of House Democrats have signed on to articles of impeachment introduced by Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Illinois). The parallel is striking: Just as House Republicans moved against Mayorkas on a largely party-line vote, should Democrats win the House, they could impeach Noem in the same fashion. It would mean that, since 2019, there would be more impeachments of presidents and secretaries than during the previous two centuries combined. Such overuse cheapens it, deepens public cynicism toward it and confirms it is more a partisan process than a political or legal one. In yet another irony, the political capital expended to remove Noem would make a third attempt to impeach Trump all the more impractical.
It isn’t for the president’s lack of trying. The founding generation warned at the Constitutional Convention and in the Federalist Papers that impeachment was a necessary safeguard against presidential abuse of power and violations of the public trust. Today, legal scholars from across the political spectrum argue that in the first six months of Trump’s second term, he committed between three to eight or more potentially impeachable offenses, including due process violations, free speech infringements and the impoundment of appropriated funds.
House Democrats agree, and even a few Republicans have expressed concerns about federal immigration agencies’ use of power under this administration. Between the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, which grants the presidency immunity for official acts, and the partisan math of a near-evenly divided Congress, the bar for executive accountability is impossibly high. The presidency becomes effectively unimpeachable.
Impeachment is overdue for reform, which would require a constitutional amendment. To restore the legitimacy of the process, the voting standards should be inverted — a two-thirds House majority to impeach and a simple Senate majority to convict.
This pushes the burden of bipartisanship to the start of the process and makes party-line impeachments virtually unattainable — no party has held a supermajority in the House since 1967. Additionally, impeachable offenses should be updated from “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” to a more modern and explicit description of constitutional triggers. Congress should also create a nonpartisan commission to oversee impeachment investigations. The chances that these measures will be adopted seem as unlikely as the conviction and removal of a president or Cabinet secretary.
When Trump was impeached for the role he played in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol in 2021, the Senate fell just 10 votes shy of a lifetime ban from holding office again. Instead, not only did Trump run and gain the presidency again, but he also won the popular vote for the first time, pardoned those who were convicted of crimes connected to Jan. 6, and directed the callous enforcement of immigration law that resulted in the death of two citizens. It is further proof that impeachment is no longer a tool of accountability but mostly a political spectacle for partisan bickering.
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