Texas History Minute

case to the Senate for trial. Senators will then act as jurors while the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the proceedings. The Senate can call witnesses to testify and vote to convict with a two-thirds majority vote.

The entire process is substantially the same in Texas for elected officials, as it is for most of the other states. Eight governors have been removed from office through impeachment. Oklahoma has impeached and removed two governors, and West Virginia impeached four members of its State Supreme Court at the same time in 2018.

The framers considered impeachment an important check on the power of the presidency and against corruption. Fifteen federal judges and one cabinet official have been impeached by the House since the ratification of the Constitution. Eight federal judges have been convicted in the Senate and removed from office. Though as of this writing, three presidents have been impeached, none have ever been removed from office.

With charges growing against Ferguson, the House of Representatives drew up 21 charges against him and voted to impeach. They then sent the charges to the State Senate for trial. The State Senate reduced the charges to ten, half of which dealt with the transfer of the $5,600. Three others dealt with the veto of university funding as an abuse of power and official oppression. After a trial, the Senate voted him out of office by a vote of 25-3 and banned him from holding any state office.

Though he was kicked out of office and disgraced in front of his colleagues, Ferguson was still very popular among his hard-core supporters and rallied back. He started his own newspaper that fall, Ferguson Forum, to promote his views that the impeachment was illegitimate. Barred from state office, he ran for president in 1920 on the American Party ticket. He only made the ballot in Texas, winning just under 10% of the vote. He lost the 1922 Democratic Primary race for U. S. Senate by a wide margin. In 1924, his wife, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson won election as governor as a stand-in candidate in a tightly-contested race. His wife was defeated for re -election in 1926, following questions of improper use of her pardoning power. She would serve one more term as governor from 1933 to 1935. Ferguson convinced his wife to run one more time in 1940. Ma placed a distant fifth. The Fergusons retired from public life afterward with James Ferguson dying in 1944 with his wife passing away in 1961.

Though no Texas official has been impeached and removed from office at the state level since Ferguson, Texas politics has