Um, impeach Obama? - Cont'd

Some speculate that if Obama tried to use the 14th Amendment to raise the debt limit unilaterally, Republicans would use it as an excuse to impeach him. Yes, it's absurd. But one astute reader reminds us that the first use of impeachment was aimed at President Andrew Johnson. I haven't independently checked this, but the reader said Johnson committed no act of wrongdoing or corruption. The legislature simply "wished him out of office, and so manufactured a power struggle between the branches." That, I think, is essentially correct. It's true that our 17th president survived removal from office by a single vote. The reader wrote, "Ironically, the faction in Congress that attempted to oust Johnson was known as ... the Radical Republicans." True, but the picture the reader draws is not quite analogous to today's GOP Hobbits. Johnson was no Lincoln. If memory serves, Johnson's hurry to make nice with the defeated Confederacy (which included vetoing most civil rights bills) underpinned his conflict with the "Radicals." It's not a stretch to imagine that many of our modern "Radicals" would have sided with Johnson's anti-Reconstruction policies.