Tom Railsback, Who Reconciled G.O.P. to Oust Nixon, Dies at 87.
'A moderate Republican congressman from Illinois, he forged a compromise on two articles of impeachment that passed the House Judiciary Committee in 1974.
Tom Railsback, an eight-term Illinois congressman who forged what he called a “fragile bipartisan coalition” between his fellow Republicans and the Democratic majority on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 to draft articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon, died on Monday in Mesa, Ariz. He was 87.
His death, in a nursing home there, was confirmed by former Representative Raymond H. LaHood, another moderate Republican, who was Mr. Railsback’s protégé and served as secretary of transportation in the Obama administration.
On July 27, 1974, the judiciary committee voted 27 to 11, with 6 of the panel’s 17 Republicans joining all 21 Democrats, to send to the full House an article of impeachment. The article accused the president of unlawful tactics that constituted a “course of conduct or plan” to obstruct the investigation of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic opposition in the Watergate complex in Washington by a White House team of burglars.
“Railsback and Walter Flowers, a Democrat, basically created the coalition that was necessary to make the House Judiciary Committee vote a bipartisan one,” Michael Koncewicz, the author of “They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power” (2018), wrote in an email.
“Several moderates and conservatives met in Railsback’s office that summer to make sure that there was an article of impeachment that they could vote for,” Mr. Koncewicz, a historian at New York University, said. “Their work not only gave the vote credibility, but it also arguably made Nixon’s conviction more likely in the Senate.”
Rather than face impeachment and a trial in the Senate, Nixon resigned in August 1974.
Mr. Railsback had been conflicted for months. He was loyal to Nixon, a friend whose support had helped him get elected to the House for the first time in 1966. . .
But in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 2012, Mr. Railsback had said bipartisanship began to evaporate shortly after Watergate.
“When I was elected as a Republican to Congress in 1966 and assigned to the House Judiciary Committee, I was impressed at how nonpartisan it was,” he wrote.
A turning point, he recalled, was the Democratic landslide in the midterm elections of 1974.
“The influx of a group of young, brash anti-Nixon Democrats created an atmosphere of division and unease,” he wrote. “The climate today in Congress appears even more fractured.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/tom-railsback-dead.html?
