Can a felon--after having served his sentence or not--serve as President? Or even run for office?

Cite? My understanding has always been that upon conviction in the Senate, the impeachee is immediately removed from office. Censure would be a completely separate, less onerous, and less constitutionally meaningful process.

The Constitution says on the subject of impeachment penalties:

This is generally held to mean that the Senate can apply lesser penalties than removal and disqualification. However, in all actual cases where a federal impeachment has led to a conviction, the official has been removed. But not all of them have been disqualified from further office.

My reading is that impeachment can’t automatically have harsher penalties than removal + disqualification. Can you cite that the Senate can impose a lesser punishment? I don’t even understand what the mechanism would be. My understanding, and IANALoS (lawyer or Senator) is that the Senate gets two options per article of impeachment: acquit or convict. If conviction is reached on any article at 2/3 or greater, the impeachee is removed from office. Are you saying there’s a later step where they impose punishment?

Here is a list of all the actions on the most recent impeachment (federal judge Thomas Porteous, for corruption.) You can see that after the Senate voted “guilty” on the four articles of impeachment, there was another, separate resolution moving to disqualify him from future office, which passed 94-2.

Apparently I was conflating that step with the removal, which now that I have read the resolutions I see actually appears in the articles of impeachment themselves.

But now I wonder why the removal from office is part of the original articles of impeachment passed by the House, but the disqualification is a separate resolution considered only after the verdict in the Senate.

Federal practice has varied over time. Before 1936 the Senate would vote separately on each article of impeachment and then on removal, creating at least the theoretical possibility that a defendant could be convicted but not removed. (This never happened.) In 1936 Senate President Key Pittman, presiding over the impeachment trial of Judge Halsted Ritter, ruled that conviction on any one article carried automatic removal, and did not allow a separate vote on removal. (Disqualification still required a separate, additional vote.) This precedent has been followed ever since.

Practice at the state level varies.

That seems to be exactly how it works. For example, disqualification did not appear anywhere in Nixon’s articles, in which each count closed thusly:

The “other Nixon” impeachment closed the same way:

What Nixon’s articles? He was never impeached. Granted, that’s just because he voluntarily resigned before it happened, and everyone knew it would have otherwise, but any articles of impeachment against Nixon must be only drafts or proposals.

They weren’t just drafts - IIRC they were reported by the Judiciary Committee to the full House but Nixon resigned before a full vote could take place.

The ® Nixon articles were passed by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974. He resigned on August 9, 1974, after Senate Republicans told him he was certain to be convicted if the articles passed the full House (which was a foregone conclusion).

The House Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment (by votes of 27-11, 28-10, and 21-17–two additional articles failed) and sent them to the House floor, but Nixon resigned before they came to a vote of the full House. Yes, there are official articles of impeachment. See The History Place - Impeachment: Richard Nixon

Fascinating, thank you.

It would be a bit ironic if the POTUS, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, could not legally carry a weapon!

That’s an interesting angle. Two thoughts come to mind:

  1. The courts, and to some extent, Congress, have traditionally given wide latitude to the President in military and foreign affairs.

  2. The President has the theoretical option of commanding troops in the field, although only Washington has actually done so.

Based on these points, I believe that any such restriction on a felon-president would be unconstitutional.

I’m sure there are lots of felons in office.

They just haven’t been caught.

Washington commanded troops in the field while serving as President? I didn’t know that.

I’m not sure that would hold up, though. Several states tried to play that game to enact term limits for their members of Congress but got slapped down. The Supreme Court ruled in that case that the list of qualifications in the Constitution were exhaustive, so state attempts to add their own qualifications were unconstitutional.

Lyndon Larouche also ran for president from prison in 1992.

It’s more recent than 1920 too. From the 2012 Democratic primary cycle there’s this.

ISTR he got stripped of his delegates by DNC rules. Still he got on the ballot at the state level. He also got on the ballot in Idaho in 2008 where he finished third behind Obama and Clinton. :Apparently background checks for nuclear weapons aren’t as stringent as for firearms. :stuck_out_tongue:

Here’s a fairly short article about the Whiskey Rebellion.

And here’s much more detail than you probably want to know.

He would simply pardon himself and go buy a gun.