Impeaching a Veep: The Colfax Case

The leaders of the House of Representatives last week were quietly preparing for the worst: that the case of Spiro Agnew will be handed to them to consider impeachment proceedings against the Vice President. The contingency planning actually began well before Agnew's difficulties were known, when the possibility, however unlikely, first loomed during Watergate that the President himself might be impeachable. Months ago New Jersey's Peter Rodino Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, put three of his staff to work researching the procedures of impeachment. Speaker of the House Carl Albert and the leadership discussed whether a special committee should be created or, as has been the practice in the past, the Judiciary Committee should first act on a motion from the floor to impeach the President. In the end, they decided to let the Judiciary Committee handle it, and Rodino and his staff now stand ready to begin proceedings within 24 hours should the need arise.

Those forms would also apply to handling the Agnew case, but there are some important differences of substance, reports TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil. Whereas any conceivable misdeeds that could bring Nixon to impeachment took place while he was President, what is known of the Agnew charges largely deal with actions that occurred before he became Vice President. There is a solid precedent that such prior offenses may not be grounds for impeachment.

That precedent is the 19th century case of Schuyler ("Smiler") Colfax, a politician from Indiana so famous for his public piety that he was also nicknamed "the Christian Statesman." Colfax served as a U.S. Representative from 1855 to 1869, including seven years as Speaker of the House, before becoming Ulysses S. Grant's Vice President.

In 1872, while Vice President, he was accused by House investigators of having taken a bribe during his tenure as Speaker by accepting 20 shares of stock in the infamous Credit Mobilier of America, a company organized to build the first transcontinental railroad --with millions of dollars in Government subsidies. To prevent an investigation of their enormous profits --dividends in 1868 alone amounted to almost 350% of the original investment --some directors of the company protectively placed shares among friendly Congressmen. Before a House investigating committee, Colfax unconvincingly denied that his stock was intended as a bribe. The committee then also discovered that he had accepted a campaign gift of $4,000 in 1868 from a contractor who had supplied envelopes to the Government at a time when Colfax was chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads.

Faced with such overwhelming evidence of misconduct, the House Judiciary Committee investigated whether the House should impeach Colfax. The question was posed thus by the committee: "What is the nature and what the objects of impeachment under our Constitution? Are they punitive or remedial?

Or, in other words, is impeachment a constitutional remedy for removing obnoxious persons from an office, and preventing their again filling office, or a power given for punishing an officer, while he is an officer, for some crime alleged to have been committed by him before he was such an officer?"

The committee concluded that impeachment was intended by the Constitution not as a way to punish malefactors, but only to remove a man from an office he has abused while occupying it. Since whatever crime Colfax had committed occurred while he was Speaker, he could not be impeached.

A century later that case is being applied to Agnew's situation by Speaker Albert and other House leaders, as well as by House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler. They have not finally resolved the question, but their present feeling is that Agnew cannot be impeached for what he did as executive of Baltimore County or Governor of Maryland, perhaps even if he continued to receive deferred payments while Vice President for deals made earlier. Only if the evidence should show that he, for example, took a bribe in return for some vice-presidential act or favor could he be impeached. That line of logic gives a new perspective to the expected arguments of Agnew's lawyers that he cannot be indicted unless first impeached and removed from office.

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