Impeachment in Chawosauria

The Chawosaurian Impeachment Model is the official impeachment process of the Empire of Chawosauria under the Imperial Constitution of the Empire of Chawosauria. Impeachment is the process of bringing charges against an office holder, it does not mean removal from office which the public widely stereotypes the process to do. But impeachment is the first task of the process that could lead to removal. In the United States, the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, brings charges against the President of the United States based on the findings of an impeachment inquiry, and once the House votes to impeach a President by voting for an article of impeachment, which is an official accusation, the vote triggers a trial of the President in the upper chamber, the Senate, and if 67 Senators believe the President is guilty, then they will remove the President by a guilty-or-acquit-vote. A Supreme Court justice, a federal judge, and a White House Cabinet member can also be impeached and removed by Congress as well. Brazil has the same impeachment process as demonstrated in the country's recent impeachment against a Brazilian President in 2016.

The problem with impeachment is that the process can be treated or abused as a petty political battleground waged by the opponents of a leader, that was well demonstrated in the United States with President Clinton in 1998 and a little bit of that against President Trump in 2019, except the case against Trump was fairly legitimate, but the process may have been partisan. With Republicans now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, President Biden have been the subject of Republican impeachment threats, however whether Republicans will actually act on these threats are yet to be seen, but if an impeachment of Joe Biden does not happen, it wouldn't be the first time that the President's opponents bluffed impeachment threats, it happened to Presidents Bush and Obama. Obama was close to suffer an impeachment proceeding in 2013, but it was vetoed by Speaker John Boehner, fearing an impeachment process against Obama would only strengthen him politically than the opposite and the result might be the 2014 midterms being another 1998 when Republicans were going after Clinton with impeachment, only to suffer a weak midterm performance in the 1998 midterm elections, as well as the clear obvious that the impeachment process against Obama would ultimately go nowhere because Democrats controlled the Senate at the time.

As a result, the Imperial Constitution of the Empire of Chawosauria made the Chawosaurian impeachment process even harder. Impeachment requires a supermajority as well as a conviction requiring a supermajority as well, but instead of triggering an ultimate removal, a successful conviction would trigger a recall election, an election where voters can vote by referendum to remove a politician that the recall seeks to remove, and adopting the California model, on same ballot, voters can choose candidates to replace the embattled incumbent in case that incumbent is removed. The best example of the third step to impeach and remove a politician in Chawosauria is the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election against the Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, a politically-motivated recall Governor Newsom easily quelled by a wide margin due to Californians sickened by the petty partisan politics of the recall.

## Background

Impeachment is the procedure in which the legislative branch of a government, and in some countries, both the legislative and judicial branches of government, moves to remove the officeholder that occupies the executive branch of government; in some countries like the United States, the President of the United States is "impeached" by the United States House of Representatives and is either convicted or acquitted by the United States Senate, conviction leads to removal with the needed number of Senators vote to convict, which has never happened in U.S. history but nearly happened once in 1868 against President Andrew Johnson. In other countries like South Korea, the legislature impeaches and the highest court in the country decides if the impeached executive is to be removed.

Chawosauria's impeachment process copies the United States' and was used really rarely until Chawosaurian Prime Minister Jonathan Sidney MacCarthy III in 2020. There are other ways to remove an executive besides impeachment; in 2021, the U.S. State of California recently had what is called a "recall election" against the state's Governor at the time, Gavin Newsom, for breaching COVID-19 public safety guidelines that he himself put in place in 2020 when the pandemic struck California that year, and as a result, the California Republican Party successfully received enough signatures to have Newsom recalled, a recall is an election in which the voters are allowed to choose whether an officeholder should be removed, the California Republicans believed that despite California being such a strongly Democratic state that gave Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden 63% of their votes over incumbent President Donald Trump is the recent election for President of the United States, the Republicans could still win the governorship in California as demonstrated by another recall election in 2003 that resulted in the election of Republican candidate, actor, and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, but unfortunately for the Republicans, the 2021 recall election against Governor Newsom took a turn to disaster territory for them when a controversial Republican candidate to replace Newsom by the name Larry Elder started to spike in the polls, universally viewed as a right-wing extremist by most Californians who are known to have little tolerance for right-wing politics, the possibility of Newsom getting successfully recalled started to crumble fast, and when election day came at an end, Governor Newsom obliterates the recall by a landslide margin of 61-38%, which was a similar margin he won in his first election as Governor in 2018, and the Republican Party faced backlash for forcing the State of California to waste $276 million of California's taxpayer dollars on a failed partisan recall election, and it didn't help the fact that the Republican Party prided itself as "the party of fiscal responsibility" by the way. Chawosaurian historians, including the most respected of all, Charles Basilica, called the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election the California Republican Party's Castle Bravo disaster.

Despite the time-wasting recall election in California, the Chawosaurian government decided during its efforts to change their constitution that they want to add a recall election to Chawosauria's impeachment process.

## Procedure

The Imperial Parliament of the Empire of Chawosauria is divided by both the Imperial Parliament with three subchambers, the Houses of Commons, Lords, and Representatives; and the Imperial Senate.

### Impeachment by Imperial Parliament

The Imperial Parliament of the Empire of Chawosauria launches an impeachment inquiry whether petitioned by the Chawosaurian people or just decided by Parliamentary leadership. The Imperial Parliament votes to start the drafting of articles of impeachment following impeachment investigations and then the Imperial Parliament's Judiciary Committee approves even one article and once the articles of impeachment are set, then the Imperial Parliament will deal with the articles similar to how a piece of legislation is dealt with before being voted on, the Imperial Parliament will introduce the articles of impeachment for legislative action, then be subjected to a schedule, and under these scheduling guidelines, the articles of impeachment will be reviewed, debated on, and then the Speaker of the Chawopolis Palace decides when the articles of impeachment be voted on, and one the day of the vote, the Imperial Parliament votes to either impeachment by voting for an article, or shoot them down, and if the articles are passed, they go to the Imperial Senate for a trial based on the articles, which are charges.

### Trial and Verdict in the Imperial Senate

The Imperial Senate receives the articles of impeachment from the Imperial Parliament and a trial begins based on the charges brought by the Imperial Parliament against the officeholder (Supreme Leader, Prime Minister, etc.) and the Senators act as the jurors and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Empire of Chawosauria presides the whole process. The Prosecution and the Defense make their cases for either conviction or acquittal, the prosecution have to provide evidence and transcripts, while the defense have to provide rebuttal evidence or an alibi. The Imperial Senate holds a vote to cast a verdict and when the Imperial Senate convicts an impeached officeholder, unlike the U.S., it does not mean removal from office, what a Chawosaurian Senate conviction does is that it triggers a recall election against the incumbent to allow the voters to decide whether to remove the incumbent or not.

### Recall Election

The Imperial Senate triggers a recall election by voting to convict the impeached incumbent officeholder. With the recall election now triggered, the Chawosaurian government must now organize the election under Chawosaurian election laws. Election Day is on the first Friday of a month, election workers must have time to prepare, so the recall election will work as any other election, except a ballot to whether to remove an incumbent. A first choice of the ballot to either remove or keep an incumbent is easily prepared, but adopting the California model, parties have to set their candidates up to replace the incumbent in case of removal. In the election to replace an incumbent, there will be a two-round system, where parties will hold primaries to nominate their candidates for the first round for selection to be one of the two selected candidates to face each other in the second round to be elected to a public office, and if one of the two contenders win the most votes, then is declared the winner of the entire election, but in order to truly win the entire election, the incumbent that the two candidates are seeking to replace must be voted out of office on the recall ballot.

## Impeachment History

### List of Failed Impeachments

 Garfield Lucas Webster | U.S. Republican Party
2. Cancellation of the 1915 Chawosaurian legislative elections
2nd charge unqualified

Garfield Webster was the first Prime Minister to have face an impeachment inquiry. The Parliament failed to impeach Webster on April 20, 1919,