It’s always surprising to me how few people understand the impeachment process. Under the Constitution, the House impeaches federal officials and then the Senate votes on whether to convict them and remove them from office or not. Impeachment is not equivalent to removal from office.

The New York Times made this mistake for the second time in the last six months on Sunday:

Because of an editing error, an article in the Week in Review section on Sunday about the conservative movement misstated the outcome of impeachment proceedings in 1998 against President Clinton, whose character conservatives made the focus of the 2000 election. The House of Representatives did indeed impeach him. (The Senate did not convict him of the impeachment charges.)

Back in December, the Times was forced to correct its own correction of an article about Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), who was impeached and then removed from the federal bench as a result of bribery allegations:

Correction: December 1, 2006

A front-page article on Wednesday about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached by the Senate and removed as a federal district judge in 1989.

Correction: December 8, 2006

A front-page article on Nov. 29 about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached and removed as a federal district judge in 1989. A correction in this space last Friday misidentified the body that impeached him. It was the House, not the Senate. (Officials are tried by the Senate and either acquitted or automatically removed from office if convicted.)

Time for some remedial civics classes…