This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 25th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Impeachment has occurred only twice, three times if you count Richard Nixon, but should Congress use it more?

After all, as Cato's Gene Healy points out, abuses of office that rise to that level happen on a fairly regular basis. We spoke last week.

Why don't we impeach presidents very often? Well we seem to be scared of the

process. You actually hear people refer to it as the I word as if it's

somehow fundamentally profane or blasphemous. You know we don't call it the V word

when the president's about to veto a bill but this is

for some reason we we go to the constitutional equivalent of H E double W. W. We're talking about impeachment. And it really is whatever you think of

Donald Trump and the cause for his impeachment, that shouldn't determine what you think about impeachment in general.

And it seems to me that the fact that we've only managed two impeachments in 230 years of constitutional history.

Nixon technically got out before the hammer fell so he technically wasn't impeached but let's call it three

given the number of crooks and clowns and abusers of power we've been saddled with through the course of

over two centuries of American

constitutional history, you think we'd have managed the job more often.

So the process of impeachment requires what are called high crimes and misdemeanors.

But what does that mean in context?

I think there's a lot of confusion about that phrase. I mean if you

take it in modern language it looks like it says you know egregious felonies and also lesser offenses.

So it's hard to tell what it means just from a plain language standpoint if you're using contemporary language. But the phrase high crime language,

but the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors,

was in use in British impeachments for about four centuries

...