From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Tim Desher, and this is Heritage Explains. As Heritage explains.

If you've been consuming news over the past three weeks, it's impossible to avoid the I word.

Impeachment.

And if you're like me, it's probably difficult to see beyond the partisan politics surrounding it.

That's why we started a three-part series, giving an unbiased view of what impeachment is,

the history, and the consequences.

Last week, Tom Jipping explained a bit of the process. In this case, I mean, America's founders were concerned that a hostile majority

in the House, let's say, could just use impeachment as an opportunity to boot out a president

that the American people had elected. So they had this two-step process. The House impeaches,

but then the president, or no one,

gets removed from office unless there's a trial in the Senate, and it takes two-thirds of the

Senate to convict. So it is a two-step process, and I think that makes sure that if we're going

to get rid of somebody who we've elected, that it's going to be for serious

matters and it's really going to take a broad consensus of our elected representatives to do that.

But as the old saying goes, it's hard to know where you're going if you don't know where you've

been. That's why this week, in part two of our series, Hans von Spikovsky talks about the historical

context of impeachment by looking at where it started, how it's been used in the past, and how

that instructs the current situation with President Trump.

Hans is a senior legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies here at the Heritage Foundation, and this week,

he explains. Hans, where did the framers get the idea initially of impeachment? Well, they got it, of course, from English history, since England was the mother country

of the United States. And there was a long history of impeachment and how it worked in the

parliamentary system that they have. And the way they finally put it into the Constitution,

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