If a president gets impeached (and convicted by the Senate) in his or her first term in office, does that legally prevent him or her for running for a second term in the future?
It’s up to the Senate. If the Senate convicts, it can remove the incumbent from office, and can also choose to make disqualifaction from office part of the punishment, as set out in Article I, Clause 7 of the Constitution:
So if the Senate chose to remove the President, it could also disqualify him or her from again holding office.
Interesting. Thank you.
It sucks when you get a recidivist.
U.S. District Court judge Alcee Hastings was impeached, convicted, and removed from office in 1989. The senate declined to disqualify him from holding other offices. Today he’s a congressman from Florida. As far as I know, he’s the only person convicted by the senate who has gone on to hold another office.
To answer the OP’s more direct question: no, being impeached and convicted does not mean you would be precluded from being elected President of the United States in the future. Not only that, but if you were impeached early enough in your term, you could potentially qualify to be elected to TWO full terms in the future. :eek:
Um, this is not quite tr4ue, and would be true only with a proviso. No person can be elected President more than twice – you’re attempting to invoke the less-than-a-half-term principle, right? In that case, our nefarious hypothetical Chief Executive would need to be elected Vice President and serve at least two years in that office, before the convenient death of his running make brings him to the Oval Office. If he then managed to burn out spectacularly enough to be impeached and convicted prior to the next Presidential elections, and if the Senate did not impose the disability clause, he could in theory run successfully twice again. This of course presupposes the American public has the collective memory of opossums – but lately that seems to be coming close to a reasonable assumption.
Also remember that while impeachment extends only to removal from office (and hypothetically to disqualification from office), it’s specifically provided that the impeachee is then and still subject to any relevant criminal or civil penalties that might properly be imposed.
Not federal, but nevertheless a useful example.
When Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was impeached last year, the state Senate held a trial. There was then one vote to convict - which removed him from office. The Senate then took a separate vote to ban him from holding future elective office in Illinois.
Blago was then indicted on various charges and arrested, and his criminal trial is pending.
Yes, sorry, I was thinking about a situation where the President was impeached after having taken over from another president, first. I didn’t manage to make that clear. :eek:
I guess since the OPs question has been answered, this isn’t too much of a hijack. Could the Senate vote to convict, yet decide to set a punishment less than removal from office? Say a 6 month suspension?
This would be in essence a censure or something of the sort. Congress, or the Senate, does vote censure from time to time.
I am not sure if the Senate sitting as the Court for the Trial of Impeachments has the power to convict but impose a lesser sentence than removal from office. Someone with access to the rules for the CftToI might check this out. Of course, if suspension were allowed, Amendment XXV would result in the V.P. sitting as Acting President during the suspension.
In early federal impeachments, the Senate conducted separate votes on conviction and sentencing. Under that process, it would have been theoretically possible for the Senate to convict but impose no punishment, although this never happened.
Since the 1930’s, the Senate when sitting as a court of impeachment has collapsed conviction and removal into a single vote. There could still be a separate vote on disqualification, but I’m not sure if anyone even moved to impose disqualification on the judges who were convicted during the 1980’s.
Nobody has ever attempted to impose a penalty lesser than removal or lifetime disqualification, so the question must be considered indeterminate. My guess would be no–if the framers wanted to allow for suspension via impeachment, they probably would have made it clear.
As Freddy says, it’s an open question. My own uneducated opinion is that the Senate doesn’t have the power to impose lesser sentences for impeachment, only the sentences set forth in the Constitution – removal and/or disqualification from future office. However, during the run-up to the Clinton impeachment, there was quite a lot of chatter about the possibility of the Senate convicting the president but imposing some lesser sentence, and at least some scholars seemed to take the possibility seriously.
I disagree with *Polycarp or at least with the implication pregnant in his post, that this would be acceptable as a form of censure. The Constitution doesn’t give the Senate, or anyone else, the power to suspend or censure the president. The Senate can adopt resolutions censuring him, and those may or may not have political clout depending on the circumstances of the time. But they have no force, any more than any other sense of the Senate resolution. And, as such, they could not work a suspension or any disability of office, whether temporary or permanent.
–Clilffy
And a follow-up question - can they impeach and convict a former president?
Yes. Since, however, the primary use of impeachment is to remove from office, it would be nearly pointless. It could, however, be done for the purposes of disqualification for office, and one could construct a hypothetical situation where this might be appropriate.
(emphasis mine)
The highlighted text would seem to imply that lesser penalties would be permitted, no?
This is a difficult question. We can imagine two scenarios–(1) the House initiates impeachment proceedings, out of the blue, against a former President; or (2) the House impeaches a President, who resigns (or his term ends), and the Senate continues the trial.
Regarding (2), there have been occasions when impeached office-holders left office, and at least twice the Senate continued the trial for a time. Senator William Blount was impeached in 1797, and then expelled by the Senate in a separate action, and the Senate went on to try him anyway. Interior Secretary Belknap was impeached in 1876, and resigned, but the Senate went on to try him anyway.
In both cases the Senate ended up dismissing the charges. So one can either cite the dismissal as evidence that the Senate cannot try a former officer, or one can cite the fact that a vote was necessary (i.e. that removal did not automatically vacate the charges) as evidence that it can.
Scenario (1) is more problematic–no one has ever attempted to initiate impeachment against a person no longer in office. The Constitution doesn’t explicitly forbid it, but it would be a stretch.
One can argue that “further” means “only this is allowed.” In which case the answer would be no.
One can argue that “further” means “nothing worse than this, but anything lesser is included.” In which case, the answer might be yes.
Ain’t Con Law fun? 
However see also Article II Section 4: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This is the foundation for the current Senate practice of coupling conviction and removal.