Guth, who specializes in American politics,<\/a> arrived at Furman in 1973 and has witnessed three of the country’s four impeachment inquiries in his professional life. Partisanship grew increasingly rigid during that time.<\/p>\n\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s really different from the 1970s when Nixon was in office and even to a certain extent the 1990s (when President Bill Clinton was impeached),\u201d Guth said. \u201cToday, the scholars who look at voting in Congress argue, and I think they\u2019re right, that there is literally no overlap in Congress in either house, but especially in the House of Representatives. The most liberal Republican is far to the right of the most conservative Democrat. There\u2019s a big gap between the parties, and in this situation almost everything becomes a matter of party loyalty and supporting your party\u2019s position.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another change Guth has noted is an increasing ignorance about how government functions, which he attributes in part to a de-emphasis on educational requirements.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s quite clear students are no longer exposed as much as a matter of routine curriculum to government and government processes, and Americans as time goes on seem to know less and less about their political system,\u201d Guth said. \u201cWe even have some studies of college students that show that they know less than grade-school educated people in the 1930s did. That\u2019s a remarkable lack of any kind of information about the way the political system works generally, and I think that is part of what goes into the desire just to not pay attention or to just avoid all of the information that\u2019s coming at them from all sides on the impeachment question.\u201d<\/p>\n
The contrast in campus reaction to the potential impeachments of Nixon and Trump is striking, Guth notes.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the remarkable things right now is I think students are kind of reflecting the national mood,\u201d Guth said. \u201cMost students just don\u2019t want to hear about it and don\u2019t want to pay much attention to it, and this is very different than the Nixon case where everybody was very interested in what was going on and you had lots of discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Americans today are also exposed to a constant deluge of information from multiple media sources, which is a situation that didn\u2019t exist especially during the Nixon impeachment. That also causes people to disengage, Guth says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have so many differing, conflicting narratives now about what all of this means and such a diversity \u2013 almost a cacophony \u2013 of voices telling people what they ought to think about it,\u201d Guth said. \u201cAnd we know from experimental studies in news consumption that when you have strong opinions on two different sides being presented, the public often has a tendency to tune out. The average citizen says, \u2018I just can\u2019t know which of these things is right, so I\u2019m just not going to listen anymore. It\u2019s too mentally taxing.\u2019 I think there\u2019s a good bit of that happening right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he thinks his students should be focused on a pivotal moment in American history.\u00a0Should the House decide vote to advance charges against the president, the next step would be a trial in the Senate.<\/p>\n
House members would act as prosecutors and senators as jurors, with the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, presiding. A two-thirds majority vote is required to convict and remove a president, which has never happened.<\/p>\n
Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, with two independents. Guth thinks persuading at least 20 Republicans to vote for conviction is highly unlikely, but he doesn\u2019t completely rule it out.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of Republican senators, although they have become increasingly conservative, still have a little bit broader of a perspective because they\u2019re elected from big state constituencies instead of narrow House constituencies, and it\u2019s been quite noticeable that most of the Republican senators have been cautious about making any statements on impeachment,\u201d Guth said. \u201c(So) it is conceivable there may be something that will be revealed in the next few days or weeks that might prompt a few of them to reconsider their party position.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pressure from members of his own Republican Party was the turning point in President Richard Nixon\u2019s decision to resign on Aug. 8, 1974. Nobody knows what will happen from here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":8517,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,69,32,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-on-the-record","category-politics-and-international-affairs","category-top-four-news-3rd-story"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}