How to Impeach a President in 9 Days: Here's What It Would Take

By Nicholas Fandos, Yahoo! News

11 January 21

fter President Donald Trump incited a mob of his supporters who violently stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, Congress is once again weighing whether to impeach him, this time with only days remaining in his term.

It is an extraordinary circumstance raising political, constitutional and logistical questions rarely contemplated in American history. No president has ever been impeached twice or in his waning days in office, and none has ever been convicted.

Given the brevity of his time left in the White House and the gravity of his conduct, lawmakers are also looking at a provision in the Constitution’s impeachment clauses that could allow them to bar Trump from ever holding federal office again.

Democrats are driving the process so far, but some Republicans have indicated they would be open to hearing a case. Here is what we know about how the process might work.

Congress can remove a president for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Constitution allows Congress to remove presidents, or other officers of the executive branch, before their terms are through if lawmakers believe they have committed “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Impeachment is a two-part process, and deliberately difficult. First, the House votes on whether to impeach — the equivalent of indicting someone in a criminal case. The charges are codified in articles of impeachment detailing the allegations of offenses against the nation.

If a simple majority of the House votes in favor of pressing charges, the Senate must promptly consider them at a trial. The House prosecutes the case, appointing impeachment managers to argue before senators, who act as the jury, and the president is traditionally allowed to mount a defense. The chief justice of the Supreme Court oversees the trial.

In the Senate, the threshold for conviction is much higher. Two-thirds of the senators seated at any given moment must agree to convict; otherwise, the president is acquitted. If all 100 senators were seated at the time of trial, that means 17 Republicans would have to join Democrats to obtain a conviction — a high bar to clear.

Impeaching Trump now could bar him from public office in the future.

While it may seem pointless to impeach a president just as he is about to leave office, there could be real consequences for Trump beyond the stain on his record. If he were convicted, the Senate could vote to bar him from ever holding office again. Following a conviction, the Constitution says the Senate can consider “disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”

Only a simple majority of senators would have to agree to successfully disqualify Trump, who is contemplating another run for president in 2024, an appealing prospect not just to Democrats but to many Republicans who are eyeing their own runs.

There’s nothing preventing a second impeachment of Trump.

The House impeached Trump in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to his attempts to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rival at the time, Joe Biden. The Senate voted to acquit him of both charges.

Only three American presidents have ever been impeached, including Trump. None has ever been impeached twice.

But there appears to be nothing in the Constitution stopping Congress from impeaching a president again on a new set of charges.

The timing is tight, but not impossible.

With Trump set to leave office on Jan. 20, one of the biggest political and logistical hurdles is the calendar. Past presidential impeachments, including the one the House undertook in 2019, have typically been drawn-out affairs with investigations, hearings and weeks of public debate.

This deliberate process is in part meant to build consensus for such a drastic action, but it is not necessary under the rules. If Democrats and some Republicans are in agreement they must act, they can move in a matter of days, bypassing the House Judiciary Committee, to draw up charges, introduce and proceed directly to a debate and vote on the floor of the House. In this case, since Congress is just beginning and committees have not yet even formed, doing so may be the only practical option.

As soon as the House votes to adopt articles of impeachment, they can immediately transmit them to the Senate, which must promptly begin a trial.

Under one theory being discussed, the House could impeach Trump and hold onto the articles for a few days to wait until Democrats take over control of the Senate, which will occur after Biden is sworn in. The length of a trial, and the rules governing it, are determined by the members of the Senate.

In a memo circulated to senators late Friday, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, suggested it may be practically impossible to convene a trial before Jan. 20, when Trump leaves office and Biden is sworn in. The Senate is currently not in session because of the looming inauguration, and all 100 senators would have to agree to change the schedule.

Trump can still be impeached as an ex-president.

History gives little guide on the question of whether a president can be impeached once he leaves office, and House lawyers were racing to understand the legal and constitutional issues.

There is precedent for doing so in the case of other high government officers. In 1876, the House impeached President Ulysses S. Grant’s war secretary for graft, even after he resigned from his post. The Senate at the time considered whether it still had jurisdiction to hear the case of a former official, and determined that it did. Ultimately, the secretary was acquitted.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional scholar at the University of North Carolina who testified in the last impeachment proceedings, wrote on Friday that he saw no reason Congress could not proceed.

“It would make no sense for former officials, or ones who step down just in time, to escape that remedial mechanism,” he wrote. “It should accordingly go without saying that if an impeachment begins when an individual is in office, the process may surely continue after they resign or otherwise depart.”

What Should We Call the Sixth of January?

By Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

10 January 21

ig protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Donald Trump tweeted before Christmas. “Be there, will be wild!” On New Year’s Day, he tweeted again: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th.” On January 5th: “I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early—doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS!” The posters called it the “Save America March.” What happened that day was big, and it was wild. If it began as a protest and a rally and a march, it ended as something altogether different. But what? Sedition, treason, a failed revolution, an attempted coup? And what will it be called, looking back? A day of anarchy? The end of America?

Trump called the people who violently attacked and briefly seized the U.S. Capitol building in order to overturn a Presidential election “patriots”; President-elect Joe Biden called them “terrorists.” In a section of “Leviathan” called “Inconstant Names,” Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, remarked that the names of things are variable, “For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice.” On the other hand, sometimes one man is right (those people were terrorists). And, sometimes, what to call a thing seems plain. “This is what the President has caused today, this insurrection,” Mitt Romney, fleeing the Senate chamber, told a Times reporter.

By any reasonable definition of the word (including the Oxford English Dictionary’s: “The action of rising in arms or open resistance against established authority”), what happened on January 6th was an insurrection. An insurrection is, generally, damnable: calling a political action an insurrection is a way of denouncing what its participants mean to be a revolution. “There hath been in Rome strange insurrections,” Shakespeare wrote, in “Coriolanus.” “The people against the senators, patricians, and nobles.” Insurrection, in Shakespeare, is “foul,” “base and bloody.” In the United States, the language of insurrection has a vexed racial history. “Insurrection” was the term favored by slaveowners for the political actions taken by people held in human bondage seeking their freedom. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, charged the king with having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The English lexicographer Samuel Johnson, an opponent of slavery, once offered a toast “To the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” And Benjamin Franklin, wryly objecting to Southern politicians’ conception of human beings as animals, offered this rule to tell the difference between them: “sheep will never make any insurrections.”

The term’s racial inflection lasted well beyond the end of slavery. In the nineteen-sixties, law-and-order Republicans used that language to demean civil-rights protests, to describe a political movement as rampant criminality. “We have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and bomb and destroy,” Richard Nixon said, in 1968. “In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark, we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.” In that era, though, “riot” replaced “insurrection” as the go-to racial code word: “riots” were Black, “protests” were white, as Elizabeth Hinton argues in an essential, forthcoming book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.” “Yet historically,” Hinton observes, “most instances of mass criminality have been perpetrated by white vigilantes hostile to integration and who joined together into roving mobs that took ‘justice’ in their own hands.” This remains an apt description of what happened on January 6th.

One possibility, then, is to call the Sixth of January a “race riot.” Its participants were overwhelmingly white; many were avowedly white supremacists. A lot of journalists described the attack on the legislature as a “storming” of the Capitol, language that white-supremacist groups must have found thrilling. Hitler’s paramilitary called itself the Sturmabteilung, the Storm detachment; Nazis published a newspaper called Der Stürmer, the stormer. QAnon awaits a “Storm” in which the satanic cabal that controls the United States will be finally defeated. So one good idea would be never, ever to call the Sixth of January “the Storming of the Capitol.”

What words will historians use in textbooks? Any formulation is a non-starter if it diminishes the culpability of people in positions of power who perpetrated the lie that the election was stolen. It’s not a coup d’etat because it didn’t succeed. It’s not even a failed coup, because a coup involves the military. And, as Naunihal Singh, the author of “Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups,” told Foreign Policy, the word “coup” lets too many people off the hook. “The people who you want to point fingers at are the president, the party leaders, and the street thugs,” Singh said. “And we lose that if we start talking about a coup; it gives a pass to all of the Republican politicians who have been endorsing what Trump’s saying.”

In truth, the language of the coop seems more appropriate than the language of the coup. I mean chickens. “Coming home to roost” quite aptly describes the arrival of armed terrorists in the hall where, moments before, Senator Ted Cruz had summoned that very flock as he stood on the floor and urged the legislature to overturn the election. Derrick Evans, the West Virginia Republican lawmaker who joined the mob and, as he breached the doors of the Capitol, cried out, “We’re in! We’re in!” acted with more honesty and consistency than the hundred and forty-seven members of the House and Senate who, later that night, voted to overturn the results of the election after having hidden, for hours, from the very people they’d been inciting for months and even years.

“Sedition” is too weak. Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of the English Language, from 1828, offered this handy way to distinguish “sedition” from “insurrection”: “sedition expresses a less extensive rising of citizens.” In any case, sedition in the sense of a political rebellion, is obsolete. “Treason,” an attempt to overthrow the government, seems fair, though it almost risks elevating what looked to be a shambles: a shabby, clownish, idiotic, and aimless act of mass vandalism. If I were picking the words, I’d want to steer very clear of ennobling it, so I’d be inclined to call it something blandly descriptive, like “The Attack on the U.S. Capitol,” or “The Sixth of January.”

“Remember this day forever!” Trump tweeted at one minute past six on Wednesday night. There’s no danger that anyone will forget it, by whatever name. The harder question is not what to call the events of that day, but what to make of the maddening four years and more that led up to it: the long, slow rot of the Republican Party; the perfidy of Republicans in the House and Senate since January, 2017; the wantonness of a conservative media willing to incite violence; the fecklessness of Twitter and Facebook; and, not least, the venality, criminality, and derangement of the President. Whether that story belongs under a chapter titled “The Rise and Fall of Donald J. Trump” or “The End of America” awaits the outcome of events.