How does the impeachment process differ between the House and Senate?
Executive summary
The Constitution splits impeachment into two distinct institutions: the House of Representatives has the sole power to impeach (to bring charges) and the Senate has the sole power to try impeachments (to judge and convict), with each chamber operating under different procedures, standards, and voting thresholds [1] [2]. That structural separation makes the House resemble an indictment/grand-jury stage while the Senate functions as the trial court — a division designed as a check-and-balance but one that leaves significant room for political discretion [3] [4].
1. Constitutional allocation: who does what and why
The Constitution expressly gives the House the sole power to impeach and the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments, and it prescribes only a few specific constraints — for example, that the chief justice presides when the president is tried and that conviction requires the concurrence of two‑thirds of senators present — leaving the chambers to fill in procedural detail themselves [1] [2].
2. The House’s role: accusation, inquiry, and managers
Functionally analogous to a grand jury, the House investigates and, if it chooses, approves articles of impeachment by a simple majority; its committees conduct inquiries, draft articles, and when the full House votes to impeach it appoints “managers” who will present the case to the Senate [5] [6] [7].
3. The Senate’s role: trial, discretion, and evidentiary practice
After receiving articles, the Senate sits as a “High Court of Impeachment” to hear evidence, call or refuse witnesses, and render a verdict; while the Senate follows certain constitutional requirements, it enjoys broad discretion to establish trial procedures, including creating trial committees and structuring debate — a latitude that has shaped varying trial practices across history [1] [8] [4].
4. Votes, penalties, and separate outcomes
The consequences differ in form and threshold: the House’s simple‑majority impeachment is a charge, not a removal, while conviction in the Senate requires a two‑thirds vote to remove an official from office; the Senate may also vote, by a separate simple‑majority, to disqualify a convicted individual from future federal office [2] [8] [5].
5. Procedure, precedent, and the politics of discretion
Although legal framers intended impeachment as a constitutional remedy against serious abuses, the Constitution leaves key terms like “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” undefined and grants each chamber procedural autonomy, a combination that renders impeachment both a legal and political process and allows partisanship or institutional agendas to shape outcomes and precedents [9] [3] [4].
6. Historical scale and practical consequences
Impeachment is rare in practice: the House has initiated hundreds of impeachment-related actions historically but only a few dozen formal impeachments; modern summaries note the House has initiated proceedings many times (over 60 inquiries) but produced a smaller number of impeachments and even fewer removals, underscoring the separation between accusation and conviction built into the two‑chamber design [6] [10] [11].
Conclusion
The House and Senate perform complementary but distinct functions in impeachment: the House investigates and indicts by majority vote and picks managers to prosecute, while the Senate conducts the trial, decides on removal by a supermajority, and may bar future officeholding by a separate majority — a constitutional division meant to balance accountability with institutional stability but one that inevitably interposes politics and procedural discretion at every step [5] [8] [2].