Here’s a simplified version of this process:
Representative introduces articles of impeachment.
Committee investigates matter and votes to send articles to full House.
House votes to impeach and sends the case to the Senate.
Senate votes to convict and the president is removed from office.
The impeachment efforts against Reagan, Bush Jr., and Bush Sr. only reached the first step of this process. These efforts
didn’t receive much support from the Democratic party as a whole, and they never made their way out of committee for a vote in front of the full House. When Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, D-Texas, introduced articles of impeachment against Reagan in 1987, the Associated Press reported that the effort had “virtually no chance of being approved”:
Gonzalez also filed articles of impeachment against Bush Sr., first in 1991, when H.R. 34 was referred to House Judiciary Committee, and then again in 1992, when H.R. 86 was put before the Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law. Neither of these efforts received a vote.
The impeachment effort against Bush Jr. was a bit more serious. Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Robert Wexler, D-Fla., introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush to the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2008. Twenty-four Republicans joined 227 Democrats to vote in favor of sending the resolution to the House Committee on the Judiciary. Bush would leave office a few months later, however, before any other action was taken on the matter.
While articles of impeachment were introduced against Reagan and Bush Sr., these efforts
never received the backing of the Democratic Party, never made it past committee, and were never brought to the House for a vote. A bit more support existed behind the impeachment efforts against Bush Jr., but again, this matter was not referred to the House for a full vote.
The only Republican president since Eisenhower (and before Donald Trump) who faced a serious threat of impeachment was Nixon. Nixon made it to step 2 of the impeachment process in July 1974 when the Judiciary Committee voted to send articles of impeachment to the House for a vote. This was a bipartisan effort, however, as six of the 17 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee joined their 21 Democrat colleagues to vote in favor of the resolution.
Nixon would have faced a vote in front of the full House, but he resigned from office before the vote took place.
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