Recent events suggest that in an important sense, whether the president is guilty of committing impeachable offenses is not the primary issue in an impeachment inquiry. The commission of an impeachable offense is only the necessary precondition for an impeachment, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. Impeachments are prospective in their purpose even if they are retrospective in their need to establish guilt in some specifiable offense. Impeachments are the grand interpretive events of American politics. In them, Congress interprets the nature of our constitutional order and reconstructs that order in a more pristine form. In the present context, that requires more than showing what the president did and laying it beside a list of "impeachable offenses." It requires explaining what Clinton's actions have meant and what an impeachment would mean for our system of government. In this crucial political task, Congress failed.