Constitution 101: Impeachment and Federalist 65

I'm a politics junkie, a progressive, and a lover of language. For all those reasons, I can imagine no better foundation for our government, and our society at large, than the Constitution and its most significant amendments. The Declaration of Independence states that the role of government is to secure unalienable rights. Trouble is, for the first few years of the United States, that laudable goal was never achieved. The Articles of Confederation, under which the nation functioned from 1777, through full ratification in 1781, till the adopting of the new Constitution in 1787, had no teeth. That is what brought about the Constitutional Convention. The new charter for our country was written in Philadelphia from May to September in 1787, as was the Bill of Rights, its first 10 Amendments. Both the core document and the Bill were fully ratified in 1789, based in part on the Federalist Papers , the latter work of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Today's post, and the rest of the group sharing the generic label Constitution 101, presents the quintessential role of the Federalist Papers  in structuring our government and society.  Alexander Hamilton anticipated, in Federalist 65, that: impeachment would divide the public at large into widely differing camps\ impeachment carries the danger that a decision would be based more on the strength of the parties than the guilt or innocence of the accused impeachment's being charged in the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate mimics the British  practice of impeaching in the House of Commons and trying in the House of Lords Come on in to the classroom for the rest of today's lecture:  impeachment as described in Federalist 65.