This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 12, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The current talk of presidential impeachment could use a better background in just what that process is, how it's been used, and what kinds of behavior it's meant to tackle.

Gene Healy provides this background in his new paper,

indispensable remedy.

It's available today at Cato.org.

We are hearing a great deal

as we head up to the 2018 midterm elections about impeachment and Democrats it seems are

hopeful to move more seriously in that direction if they take over the House and

the Senate.

You've written a paper about impeachment broadly,

but it is not, to be clear, about the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Well, that's right.

I think in what the paper's designed to do is take a step back from the tribal

mania that's going on, you of the truest things that Alexander Hamilton ever said was that

impeachments would seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community and divided into parties.

And we're definitely seeing that now.

What the paper is designed to do is to take a step back from the fog of partisan warfare and lay out a primer about impeachment's

purpose, how it's been used historically, and it's legitimate and less legitimate uses.

In the paper I don't take a position on whether Donald Trump should be impeached or not and in many ways I think while obviously

the current impeachment debate is inseparable from Donald Trump I think

impeachment writ large should not be about Donald Trump and it should never be about, you know, what you think of the constitutional provisions for impeachment, your understanding of them, their utility shouldn't turn on what

you think about the current president because he's not going to be the last president we have and if you raise the bar to impeaching the president to save a president you love or lower the bar to impeachment in order to prosecute a president that you don't like,

...