This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 16th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States was officially in existence nearly eight decades before Congress impeached a president.

That's not exactly how the founders envisioned that authority to be used.

Cato Vice President Jean Healy is author of Indispensable Remedy, the broad scope of the Constitution's impeachment

power.

We recently discussed the first presidential impeachment.

Hey, this one's mine, this button.

This one, remember?

I guess these are all yours,

In peach Eisenhower,

Inpeachson, impeachment,

and Johnson, impeached Ronald Reagan.

That, of course, is Woody Allen and Diane Keaton from Annie Hall. Not everyone is as

gung-ho about impeachment as Woody Allen's character, Alvee Singer.

But we hear the I word impeachment a lot now today surrounding this president.

You call it in your paper for Cato, and the indispensable remedy in the subtitle

the paper, the broad scope of the Constitution's impeachment power.

So why do we have this term indispensable remedy? Who used it?

It's actually an adjective that both James Madison and George Mason used at the Constitutional Convention to describe impeachment.

Madison said it was indispensable that some provision be made for defending the community from the incapacity negligence or

perfidy of the chief magistrate.

...