Houston Chronicle by Leslie H. Southwick 1/29/2021
Opinion: Impeach a former president? Texas tried in 1841.
The most recent impeachment approved by the House of Representatives charged a president who has since left office with inciting an insurrection. A Senate trial looms. Though two or three examples of bringing delayed proceedings against other federal officials have been identified during the current controversy, no postmortem, as it were, consideration of impeachment of a president of the United States has ever occurred before. Is it valid to do so?
Whether valid or not, a delayed presidential impeachment did occur in the Republic of Texas, a separate nation from its declaration of independence in 1836 until its annexation as a state in 1845. The new nation’s constitution was drafted rather hurriedly as independence was being proclaimed while the Mexican army approached. Haste meant adopting almost verbatim much of the U.S. Constitution, including the provision specifying the penalties for impeachment. The argument today is that because disqualification from holding future office can be imposed upon conviction, a former president remains subject to impeachment. A similar question and proposed answer arose in Texas about impeaching a just-departed president.
In the second Texas national elections, held in 1838, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was elected president for a three-year term. Lamar was only 40 years old when elected. He had been well-educated as the son of a wealthy Georgia planter and had arrived in Texas only in 1835. He could be, with fateful consequences for his young country, an impractical visionary who seemingly felt unconstrained by the law.
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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opinion-Impeach-a-former-president-Texas-tried-15905969.php
