At the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, James Madison was determined to persuade his skeptical fellow delegates about why tools such as impeachment were necessary to remove the president from office.
As he put it, it was
indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community [against] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate. The limitation of the period of his service, was not a sufficient security. He might lose his capacity after his appointment. He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.
Hardly a baseless set of concerns, as it turned out.
The Constitution’s “indispensable” remedy for a lawless president has been attempted four times and has never once succeeded. Andrew Johnson survived by a single vote. Bill Clinton was acquitted comfortably. Donald Trump was acquitted twice, the second time mere weeks after he summoned a mob that ransacked the Capitol and hunted the very senators who would sit in judgment of him. (To be fair, Madison’s safeguard can claim one win: Richard Nixon resigned when his removal from office became inevitable.)
No one seriously believes all of those acquittals reflected senators’ honest judgment of the evidence. In 2019, Jeff Flake estimated that at least 35 of his former Republican colleagues in the Senate would vote to remove Trump if the ballot were secret.
After Jan. 6, the fear turned physical. Mitt Romney recounted to his biographer that a member of Republican leadership, leaning toward conviction, was talked out of it by colleagues invoking his personal safety and his children, and that a House Republican wanted to vote to impeach but wouldn’t for fear of his family. Romney himself was paying $5,000 a day for private security.
Seven Republicans voted to convict in the end; 17 were needed. The roll call measured fear, not judgment.
The standard they failed is an old one, set down by the founding figure of Anglo-American conservatism. Edmund Burke told the electors of Bristol in 1774: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” And Burke meant it: an early opponent of the slave trade representing a port enriched by it, he was eventually defeated for reelection a few years later.
Perhaps Flake was onto something. The problem suggests a fix as simple as it is unglamorous: let the Senate vote on impeachment verdicts by secret ballot.
Here is how it would work. On the final question of guilt under each article, senators would vote by secret ballot, with only the totals announced. Each senator’s vote would still be recorded and entered on the Senate Journal, as the Constitution requires. But that portion of the Journal would be sealed, published only after some reasonable length of time, such as 10 or 20 years. History gets the names. The president’s immediate ability to inflict political—or physical—punishment does not.
The House could adopt the same rule for approving articles, where it’d be worthwhile for the same reasons. But the Senate, where the two-thirds threshold hands a determined partisan minority its veto, is where the change matters most.
If Democrats win majorities this November, the Congress that convenes in January can adopt these rules at once—while Trump is still in office and the need for his impeachment and removal is still urgent. This simple measure, which can be adopted by a simple majority vote, could make the difference between the triumph of the Constitution or a lawless despot remaining in office until 2029, when he is likely to be even more dangerous as he approaches the end of his constitutional maximum of two terms.
The Constitution Already Allows This
None of this requires a constitutional amendment, a statute, or even the other chamber’s cooperation. Article I, Section 5 provides that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” That is the same authority that sustains the filibuster, the committee system, and every other feature of congressional procedure the Constitution never mentions. The Senate’s current impeachment rules call for a public roll call on the articles, but those rules are the Senate’s own creation, amendable by the body that adopted them.
One objection that some might raise is Article I’s Journal Clause: the yeas and nays, it reads, “shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.” But read the whole clause. Each House must publish its Journal “excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.” Recording and publication are distinct acts. A conviction vote recorded by name, entered on the Journal, and then placed under seal satisfies the command while invoking the secrecy option also provided. The Constitution requires that the record exist; it leaves the question of disclosure to each chamber’s judgment.
This sort of sealed-then-published approach is as old as the republic. For its first six years, the Senate did all its business behind closed doors, debates and votes alike; secrecy was the default and allowing a public gallery was the innovation. A Senate voting out of public view would hardly have struck the Founders as unthinkable; they did it themselves. Sealing one page of the Journal for a generation is less secrecy than the founding generation practiced routinely.
Executive sessions on treaties and nominations stayed secret until 1929. The Constitutional Convention sat under an injunction of secrecy, its journal sealed for three decades until Congress ordered it printed. The Senate’s impeachment rules still provide for deliberating on the verdict behind closed doors, as Clinton’s trial did, rejecting a motion to open the doors 59-41; the Trump trials instead dispensed with collective deliberation altogether.
The deeper warrant is one Americans long ago accepted for themselves. For most of the 19th century, Americans voted in public, viva voce or with party-printed tickets any observer could easily identify. The results were what you would expect: employers marched workers to the polls, landlords watched tenants, and corrupt party machines bought votes and verified delivery. The so-called “Australian ballot” swept the states after 1888 to make honest voting possible by allowing people to keep their vote private. Secrecy defeated coercion and corruption at a stroke, because a threat cannot be enforced, and a bribe cannot be verified, against a vote that cannot be proven.
Every argument for that reform applies with greater force to senators sitting in judgment of a president. They swear a second oath, distinct from their oath of office, to do “impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws,” an oath that presupposes votes answering to evidence and conscience rather than the president’s political pressure. The same unprovability that freed voters at the polls could have the same effect here.
South Korea Proved It Works
South Korea has already run the experiment. Its law requires the National Assembly to vote on presidential impeachment by anonymous ballot, and that rule has now removed two presidents.
In December 2016, the Assembly impeached Park Geun-hye by 234 to 56, a total that was possible only because dozens of her own party’s lawmakers defected under cover of secrecy. The Constitutional Court unanimously upheld her removal, and the country proceeded to an orderly election.
In December 2024, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and sent troops to the Assembly itself. The first impeachment vote failed when Yoon’s party walked out of the chamber to deny a quorum. (No such tactic works in the Senate, where conviction takes two-thirds of those present but a simple majority is a quorum.)
Notice what the boycott admitted: leadership could not whip a secret ballot, so its only remaining tool was to prevent its members from voting altogether. That naked obstruction collapsed within a week under public fury. With Yoon’s party back in their seats, the Assembly impeached him 204 to 85, with at least a dozen cross-party defections and the secret ballot widely credited for tipping the scales. The Constitutional Court removed him unanimously, and a president who had attempted a self-coup was out of office, lawfully and peacefully. That is what a functioning check looks like.
There are predictable objections, but on the balance of considerations, none of them hold up.
Voters deserve to know. They will, in time. Deferred publication is accountability to history rather than to the moment’s enforcers, and Burke’s answer covers the rest: the representative who sacrifices judgment to opinion betrays the people he serves. And be honest about what enforces today’s “accountability”: primary electorates, party bosses, the president himself, and men issuing death threats. This is far removed from any ideal of representative government.
It would make impeachment too easy. It lowers no threshold; a frivolous partisan impeachment dies on needing 67 votes either way. Secrecy changes the outcome only when a bipartisan supermajority already privately believes the president guilty but is deterred from saying so, which is precisely the failure the remedy exists to reach. And it cuts both ways, shielding senators from mobs demanding conviction no less than acquittal. Nor does the rule have a party: a Republican Senate trying a Democratic president would enjoy the same protection.
Senators should show courage. Of course they should. But a check that can operate only when 67 politicians volunteer for career destruction and 24/7 security details will never operate at all. Madison knew that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm;” a sound constitutional design economizes on virtue rather than demanding unobtainable levels of it.
Removal by anonymous vote would lack legitimacy. The verdict is the Senate’s, rendered collectively, after a public trial on public evidence, under the steepest supermajority requirement in the Constitution. What actually corrodes legitimacy is the current spectacle: trials whose verdicts are known before the evidence is heard, and acquittals everyone understands to be products of nakedly partisan politics.
Nothing has done more than the non-viability of impeachment to teach presidents, and this president in particular, that they are above the law. The courts can only do so much, even when they aren’t also stuffed with ideologues sympathetic to the president’s party. We need an impeachment process that can work, and secret ballots are the only proven way to get it.
Do It In January
I have made the case for impeachment since the first months of this term: a president who cannot be restrained, reasoned with, or babysat leaves the country a binary choice: Trump or the Constitution.
But Democratic leadership has resisted it all as a distraction; Hakeem Jeffries has repeatedly been clear he regards impeachment talk as an annoyance, and is not eager for another. The argument has been centered on futility: why begin a trial destined to end in acquittal?
The secret ballot dissolves the excuse. The first two trials failed on the roll call, not on the evidence. A third impeachment is coming regardless, I expect. The outrages will force it and will eventually overcome the resistance of Democratic leadership. The question is whether it arrives in a Senate whose verdict is preordained or one where conviction is genuinely possible.
These rules belong atop the new Congress’ organizing agenda in January, particularly as the likelihood of Democrats taking the Senate continues to grow.
The republic trusts the secret ballot to protect voters from intimidation. It should extend the same trust to their representatives. The impeachment oath demands impartial justice. The Senate’s rules should make that oath survivable.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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Why can't we bring up emergency impeachment for the whole administration based on all the crimes they are doing and use the famous words NATIONAL SECURITY
Kudos on a thoughtful piece. I will confess this was an option I had never even considered. It needs to become a rule change goal for 2027. I would be in favor of a 20 or 25 year secrecy so that by and large all the parties involved will have moved on.