While making dinner tonight (Jalfrezi), Patricia McNulty and I got into a discussion about impeachment....the sins of Nixon and Clinton and the talk about Kristi Noem. And, the man in the Oval Office.

There’s something almost cyclical about the way “impeachment” drifts back into the national conversation. Nixon, Clinton, Trump — each case lives in a different political universe, but they all tell us something about how power, accountability, and public trust collide in real time.

Start with Nixon, because he’s the ghost that haunts every impeachment debate. What makes Watergate so singular isn’t just the break-in or the dirty tricks — it’s the cover-up. The articles of impeachment weren’t about being politically ruthless; they were about using the machinery of government to obstruct justice, defy subpoenas, and undermine the rule of law. When the “smoking gun” tape came out and Republican support collapsed, Nixon resigned before the House could even vote. The system didn’t just threaten him; it cornered him, and the political reality became undeniable.

Clinton’s case, two decades later, feels almost like the mirror image. The underlying behavior was personal, not a scheme to bend the government to his will. The impeachment was about perjury and obstruction tied to a civil lawsuit, not an abuse of presidential power in the Nixonian sense. The House impeached, the Senate acquitted, and Clinton left office with high approval ratings. It showed that impeachment isn’t just a legal process — it’s a political one. Public opinion matters. Party alignment matters. The country’s tolerance for the offense matters.

Trump’s first two impeachments landed in a different era entirely — hyper-partisan, media-saturated, and deeply tribal. The first, over Ukraine and pressure on a foreign government to investigate a political rival, echoed Nixon in one key way: the allegation that presidential power was being used for personal political gain. The second, after January 6, centered on the most elemental question of all — whether a president bears responsibility for violence aimed at disrupting the peaceful transfer of power. In both cases, the House impeached, and the Senate acquitted, largely along party lines.

So what does that history tell us about talk of a third impeachment, or the idea of impeaching cabinet officials like a DHS secretary? Maybe the biggest lesson is that impeachment isn’t just about the severity of the alleged misconduct. It’s about whether a critical mass of the political system — Congress, the president’s own party, and the public — decides that the line has truly been crossed.

Nixon fell when his own side let go. Clinton survived because the public didn’t see his actions as disqualifying. Trump’s impeachments happened in a country so polarized that the same events produced entirely different moral universes, depending on where you stood.

And that’s where we are now. The debates about Kristi Noem, about Trump’s comments, about what might happen if the House changes hands — they’re not just arguments about law or procedure. They’re arguments about what kind of behavior Americans are willing to tolerate from people in power, and what they believe accountability should actually look like.

History doesn’t give us a script for how this ends. What it gives us is a reminder: impeachment is less a courtroom drama than a national conversation. The outcome is shaped as much by voters, media, and political will as by the Constitution itself. In that sense, the real question isn’t just “Will there be another impeachment?” It’s “What does this moment tell us about what the country expects from its leaders — and what it’s prepared to do when those expectations aren’t met?”