Hughes is a research specialist at the University of Virginia.
Once, not so long ago, congressional Republicans were impeachment's constitutional stalwarts.
They stood up for the House's "sole power of impeachment," a power granted in the Constitution, including the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence. Even when the president under investigation was a Republican. Even when the Republican political base threatened to turn against them.
But that was when the president was Richard Nixon, not Donald Trump.
With the Senate trial about to get started, a look back is in order.
I wrote a book on the origins of Watergate, so I get asked a lot how Trump's impeachment inquiry compares with Nixon's.
Much remains the same, especially the partisan attacks. In 1974, as today, Republicans complained that the impeachment inquiry was too secret, too leaky and a violation of presidential rights. Both Team Nixon and Team Trump called their respective inquiries a "witch hunt," a "lynch mob" and a "kangaroo court."
There is one vital difference between then and now.
In 1974, when the president defied some impeachment subpoenas, many congressional Republicans said that that was, all by itself, an impeachable offense.
Yet in December, not a single House Republican voted for the second article of impeachment, charging Trump — who has defied every impeachment subpoenas, with obstruction of Congress.
In 1974, many House Republicans defended the impeachment subpoena power at great political risk.
In January of that year, Nixon told House Republicans, "I'm going to fight like hell" against impeachment.
His first move was to invoke "executive privilege" to justify his refusal to turn over evidence, like his secretly recorded White House tapes, to congressional investigators.
A key House Republican, Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, firmly drew the line. The ranking minority Republican on the Judiciary Committee, he said the doctrine of executive privilege "in an impeachment inquiry must fail."
The committee's Republican counsel, Albert Jenner, agreed "100,000 percent." He warned that if the president resisted a subpoena, "the committee could exercise its judgment and include the action in its consideration of whether articles of impeachment should be brought."
In February 1974, the full House backed the committee up, granting it the power to subpoena anything and anyone up to the president himself. The vote was bipartisan, 410 in favor, and only 4 Republicans opposed.
In another bipartisan move, the Judiciary committee voted 33 - 3 in April 1974 to subpoena Nixon's tapes. The Senate minority leader, Republican Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, warned that failure to comply would put the administration in "grave danger … with serious consequences possibly leading to impeachment."
While today's Republicans complain that the House didn't leave it to the courts to decide whether the president has to comply with its subpoenas, in May 1974 only six of the committee's 17 Republicans voted to punt the issue to the courts. As Jenner put it earlier that year, "No court in the land has the power to review House and Senate actions on impeachment."
The committee voted 21 - 17 in July 1974 to impeach the president for subpoena defiance. Two Republicans voted with the Democratic majority. Nixon resigned in August before the full House had a chance to vote.
This bipartisan – nonpartisan – history is one that today's congressional Republicans have erased and replaced.
Testifying in December as a Republican witness before the Judiciary Committee, law professor Jonathan Turley called the constitutional principle that the House decides the evidence and witnesses required for an impeachment inquiry an "extreme position."
But that position was endorsed by eight committee Republicans (and 20 Democrats) when they wrote this to Nixon in May 1974: "Under the Constitution it is not within the power of the president to conduct an inquiry into his own impeachment, to determine which evidence, and what version and portion of that evidence, is relevant and necessary to such an inquiry. These are matters which, under the Constitution, the House has the sole power to determine."
This view was mainstream, not extreme, and retains majority support by Americans today.
To justify the current congressional Republican position that the House should let the courts decide its subpoena powers, Turley, a professor of constitutional law, gave a comically inaccurate account of legal history.
According to Turley, the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon told the president, "'We've heard your arguments. We've heard Congress' arguments. And you know what? You lose. Turn over the material to Congress.' You know, what that did for the Judiciary Committee is, it gave this body legitimacy."
There are three problems with Turley's history: First, the Supreme Court did not hear Congress' arguments, since Congress never took the matter to court. The case of U.S. v. Nixon was pressed by the Justice Department's Watergate special prosecutor. Second, the court did not order Nixon to turn over his tapes to Congress, only to the special prosecutor; therefore, third, the decision could not add anything to the House Judiciary Committee's legitimacy.
Turley's is partisan history for partisan purposes. It enables one party to abandon principle and precedent while accusing the other of doing the same.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.