High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The phrase, "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" can be evading to the human ear, the same way those trusty attorneys can change the meaning of two words like cat and dog by twisting them around to appear as felidae and canidae even though the meaning or relation is quite similar. The phrase, "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" must be understood in the manner used to understand law and it's functions. In other words to make this a whole lot simpler lets break the phrase down into three pieces.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The first part of the phrase is in blue, the second part in green, and the third part in red. This method should make my explanation a whole lot easier.
I. High Crimes
What are high crimes anyway? Well in this case the adjective "high" couldn't be used to describe the elevation that the crime is being committed at, it must mean that the crime being committed has to be a necessarily big or dangerous crime. For instance the small crime would be like, parking in a 20 minute zone for 30 minutes or stealing a pack of gum from your friends backpack. Some of those "small meaningless" crimes we all do now and then, they would be "small crimes". A bigger and badder, as it is known, would have to involve something more serious than parking in a red zone, leaving your car door unlocked, or not eating your vegetables. A crime like stealing money from the bank or spray-painting uncommonly used words on the side of the freeway can be considered high crimes. However you'll rarely ever see a senator stealing from a bank or the President on the side of the freeway with a can of paint in his hand. In fact you rarely ever see any government officials anywhere except on your TV at home. So what kind of big crimes can these people pull? As a true example, one of the many reasons President Nixon was impeached was due to the fact that he had stolen from the public. Now you wonder how can he steal from the public with out us knowing about it. Well he decided that it was going to be handy-dandy, OK-doky, if he took about $432,787 from back taxes and slipped it into his pocket behind everybody's back. Well it wasn't so handy-dandy when the IRS found out. He had to resign and be pardoned by the new President, Ford, to prevent from going to court. Otherwise it was, "Go directly to jail" for him and his amigos; "do not pass go, do not collect $200".
II. And
You may be wondering why I bother to highlight the term and in the phrase above. Well, the word has a very important function in the complete phrase given in the Constitution of the United States; Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. In this phrase, there are two aspects that need to be fully understood in order for anybody to understand the full meaning of the phrase. These keywords allow attorneys to wobble around the meaning of the phrase, so they must study the phrase very carefully before jumping to conclusions. If we start with the words or other, we can determine that the phrase is being broken down into three separate crimes; treason(one), bribery(two), and high crimes and misdemeanors(three). This allows us to conclude that to impeach a president or government official they must stand within at least one of these categories. The trouble understanding the phrase comes at the point when we reach the word and, this word can bring a lot of controversy. For instance, the word and could have been used to link high crimes with misdemeanors, then those two crimes would be considered as one crime. If that were true, then the phrase could be comparing high crimes and misdemeanors to treason and bribery. Or, the phrase could mean that a high crime and a misdemeanor are needed to impeach. It could also mean that high crimes like treason and bribery are needed to impeach. This would go to show that there is no specific way to read the law.
III. Misdemeanors
Today, with our advanced knowledge on how to break down the root meanings of words and determine a round about definition for any word that we come across, we might think of misdemeanors as a small, petty offense or crime. However the authors of the Constitution thought differently. Arousing from England during the 18-century, the word "high misdemeanor" had a different meaning. Unlike the crimes that are done today against people or their property and possessions, misdemeanors were characterized as a crime against the state, a larger offense. The word applies to Impeachment as a punishment from the public. Or in other words if a government official abuses his power, neglects his duty, or is corrupt, then the people suffer, so the people impeach.
Example: You can think of misdemeanors as obvious reasons to fire someone. If you hired a worker to mown your lawn and paid him $5 to do it on a regular basis every week, then you would expect the job of cutting the lawn to get done every week, otherwise you are losing money for nothing. No one wants to lose money. If the worker never got the job done and was always neglecting their duty, you'd probably fire them. In the same case if the President of the United States, with a pay role of $200,000 a year, neglected his duty, then this would allow you to impeach him and hopefully remove them from office, or in other words fire them!