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please go back and check your history:
1) Impeachment proceedings were not brought against Nixon in the House until AFTER the Senate Select Committee (aka the Watergate Committee or Ervin Committee) conducted a thorough investigation into Watergate;
2) Prior to the Senate Select Committee hearings, there was absolutely no support in the country for impeaching Nixon;
3) It was not until after the Ervin Committee, through very slow and careful investigation, unveiled wrongdoing in the Nixon White House that the House Judiciary Committee even began to consider looking into impeachment;
4) Throughout 1973 and part of 1974, the hard-core anti-Nixon crowd screamed and yelled and lambasted Congress for not trying to impeach Nixon immediately after the 1972 election. At the time, Senator Ervin, House Judiciary Chair Peter Rodino and other Senate and House Democrats refused to take the bait and, instead, very carefully and methodically laid the necessary groundwork. It was not until February 6, 1974 that the House of Representatives authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings. That authorization was based largely upon the evidence developed by the Ervin Committee.
Had Congress launched into impeachment proceedings right after the 1972 election, as some pressed them to do, Nixon would have finished out his term since, not only was there insufficient evidence to support an impeachment investigation, there was no public will to impeach the president. It took the Watergate hearings - and the testimony of John Dean, Alexander Butterfield (who revealed the existence of the tapes that helped to bring Nixon down), and others - to slowly, but surely, give the public probable cause to believe that Nixon was a criminal president. Only then was impeachment feasible.
So, while the Nixon impeachment may be instructive, it is important not to distort the history or try to draw analogies to it based upon a misreading of what actually happened.
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