A president is facing impeachment, nearly exactly when Arthur Schlesinger anticipated. At the conclusion of The Imperial Presidency in 1973, he offered a warning:
“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” …
In other words, Schlesinger claimed that whenever there is something like a Nixonian moment of embarrassment to the office, it is supposed to have a legacy of about 50 years, operating as a check on presidential conduct. But as the memory of it erodes, presidents gain more confidence in their ability to push the boundaries of their power.
To be clear, we are not claiming that there is some deterministic logic to the timing of impeachment, nor are we asserting that Schlesinger actually prognosticated President Donald Trump’s ascent and current predicament. Rather, we view Schlesinger’s claim about recurrent presidential corruption and impeachment as an invitation to consider the significance of today’s impeachment inquiry in American political, institutional, and constitutional development. To do so, we consider Trump’s potential impeachment through two American Political Development frameworks: Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political/secular time and Keith Whittington’s idea of constitutional construction. CONT.
John Dearborn & Jack Greenberg (Yale), A House Divided