John Pickering was a federal judge whose impeachment in 1803 made him the first federal officer convicted and removed from office by the Senate. His case is discussed by Gene Healy in a single episode of The Bob Zadek Show as part of a historical examination of the impeachment clause. Healy presents Pickering as one of the earliest precedents for how the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” was actually applied, and as evidence that the clause was not limited to criminal conduct.
The first three impeachment cases
Healy identifies the first place to look for impeachment precedent as the first three cases, which occurred within roughly fifteen years of ratification. In chronological order these were Senator William Blount in 1797, federal judge John Pickering in 1803, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Chase the following year. Healy emphasizes that these cases involved contemporaries of the Constitution’s ratifiers, some of whom had been involved in drafting it, at a time when the document was recent in living memory. He treats this proximity as reason to credit their interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Low Tweets and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment Debate Through the Lens of History and the Constitution (2018)
Of the three cases, Healy says only one involved anything that could even arguably be called a crime. That case was not Pickering’s.
Pickering’s impeachment and removal
Pickering was the second of the three cases and the first to result in a conviction and removal of a federal officer. According to Healy, Pickering “wasn’t guilty of any crime.” He was impeached and removed for showing up to work drunk and ranting like a maniac from the bench. Low Tweets and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment Debate Through the Lens of History and the Constitution (2018)
Healy draws a general conclusion from this: the case indicates how broad the interpretation of high crimes and misdemeanors was. In his account, the clause indicated demonstrating unfitness for high office, and that unfitness could be demonstrated in any number of ways. Pickering’s conduct, though not criminal, was treated as sufficient grounds for removal.
The Chase case and the pattern
Healy pairs Pickering with the case of Justice Samuel Chase, impeached in 1804 and tried in 1805, who escaped removal by four votes. The bulk of the offenses charged against Chase consisted of being an openly partisan Federalist from the bench. He gave a charge to a grand jury in which he ranted against Jeffersonian Republicans and seemed to condemn the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and in various other trials had shown real partiality against small-r Republican defendants. None of this was a crime, yet the Jeffersonians thought it demonstrated Chase’s unfitness to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. Low Tweets and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment Debate Through the Lens of History and the Constitution (2018)
For Healy, the three early cases together show that impeachment is not a narrow technical remedy directed against violations of the criminal law. Just the opposite: it can be directed against anything that arguably shows unfitness to serve. Pickering’s removal, as the first conviction, is the sharpest illustration of that reading, since the conduct at issue was never charged as a crime.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the 2018-12-30 discussion of impeachment with Gene Healy, treats John Pickering. The excerpts show no development or change in treatment across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Pickering’s state, the date of his impeachment trial, the specific articles brought against him, or the vote by which he was convicted. They do not name the statute or constitutional provision under which he was charged beyond the general reference to high crimes and misdemeanors, and they do not describe his earlier career or his death. The excerpts also break off before any discussion of how Pickering’s case bears on the impeachment of a president, which was the stated frame of the episode.