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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) The United States went nearly two centuries with only one impeachment of a president Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that failed to remove him from office.

In the last half century, the pace has noticeably increased. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned rather than face imminent impeachment. Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 on allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, and now there is a hue and cry to impeach Donald Trump for collusion with the Russians during the campaign or for obstruction of justice as president.

No evidence of collusion has been made public and as for obstruction of justice, it is based so far on one remark noted by the participant in a conversation with only two people present, and the other person denies it.

Even if one were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to former FBI Director James Comey and take his word against that of the president, an admonishment to let this go might prompt a comment from Comey himself that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

The problem is Congress is full of people who arent reasonable. Despite the rejection of the political class by millions of voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries and elected Trump to the presidency, these incumbents, abetted by the mainstream media, continue to play a game of politics instead of addressing the nations problems health care, jobs, standard of living, education, crumbling infrastructure and so on.

Whatever Clintons moral missteps, the use of the impeachment mechanism against him was clearly motivated by partisan passions and a perversion of what the framers intended as a last resort to remove a criminal from office.

If Trump is as unfit for office as his critics believe (and as he seems intent on demonstrating), then the appropriate way to deal with it, short of proven criminal activity, is to have Congress take control of legislation and for voters to turn Trump out of office after a drubbing for his supporters in midterm elections.

The Montana House special election this week pitting Democrat Rob Quist against Republican Greg Gianforte and the Georgia runoff vote next month between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel could provide a preview of what to expect in 2018 congressional elections.

In the toxic atmosphere of the Beltway Bubble, meanwhile, there are already frenzied calls for impeachment.

The political and media hysteria surrounding the Trump administration, veteran Democratic operative Ted Van Dyk wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal, lies somewhere on the repulsiveness scale between the Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution and the McCarthy era.

The obsession of East Coast media and congressional Democrats with Russia, to the exclusion of virtually everything else, is out of step with the concerns of voters in the rest of the country. In fact, it is starting to look like a smoke screen to obscure the fact that Democrats have no constructive answers to these real problems.

For all the misfortunes facing their foe in the White House, Democrats have yet to devise a coherent message on the policies that President Trump used to draw working-class voters to his campaign, New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin concluded in a story headlined Outside Washingtons Blazing Inferno, Democrats Seek an Agenda.

Martins story focused on Quists campaign in Montana in the special election to fill the House seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, Trumps interior secretary. Quist spends his time talking about affordable health care, not Russia, because high insurance premiums are a much bigger issue for Montana voters.

Journalist Nate Silver lists five factors from previous impeachment situations that determine how likely a Trump impeachment is. These are the seriousness of the alleged offenses, the partisanship of pivotal votes in Congress, the presidents popularity, the presidents relationship with Congress, party control of Congress, and line of succession.

Silver discusses each factor in detail, but the simple fact is that the three cases of impeachment including Nixon, who resigned under threat of impeachment, as well as Andrew Johnson and Clinton all came when the opposition party controlled Congress. Even a Democratic majority in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections might have trouble getting an impeachment vote through, Silver says.

However, Vice President Mike Pence being next in line might make it easier for Republicans to buck that historical precedent. If the theory is that you shouldnt hire a well-qualified understudy because he makes your job more vulnerable, then Trump made a mistake in picking Pence as his running mate, Silver opines.

All this prognosticating and calculating, however, ignores one salient fact 63 million citizens voted for Trump as president and delivered him a solid Electoral College majority. (The reductionism by some Democrats who insist that only 70,000 votes in three states made Trump president studiously ignores this fact.)

The best way to remove him from office is to vote for someone else when and if he runs for re-election. This is the way voters got rid of an unpopular Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush (and discouraged Lyndon Johnson from even running again).

Bringing out the bazooka of impeachment at this early stage is second-guessing voters who just seven months ago elected Trump president, despite all his evident personality flaws and questionable business dealings.

At the very least, opponents should wait until criminal and congressional investigations produce hard evidence of real wrongdoing by the president himself, rather than a rush to judgment on the basis of anonymous and uncorroborated allegations.

It would be the ultimate political dysfunction, and perhaps the death knell for our democracy, if lawmakers routinely turned to impeachment in an attempt to subvert the will of the people for patently political motives.

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Opinion: Calls for Trump's impeachment are a perversion of democracy - MarketWatch