Well, but Trump was impeached twice and Bill Clinton once and neither of them was removed from office. I think precision is called for in these perilous times. IOW impeaching Trump isn’t going to be enough. He needs to be removed from office.
That’s going to look especially great on the new $250 bills!
And the National Parks Pass will benefit, too!
I would just like to note that the Constitution does not prohibit trying the executive more than once on the same articles of impeachment. There is nothing in the Constitution that says articles of impeachment have an expiration date or apply to only a single trial. The fifth amendment double jeopardy clause says “nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb,” but an impeachment trial does not put a person in jeopardy of life or limb; the penalty for conviction upon impeachment is solely limited to removal from office and potential bar to further office.
Article I, Sec. 3:
Summary
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.
My view, possibly nearly unique to me, is that the orange felon could be convicted in the Senate tomorrow on either set of charges for which he was already impeached if the votes were there. There are at least two possible and reasonable counters to this idea: (1) perhaps Constitution intended that the articles of impeachment must be tried by the same Congress that adopted the articles of impeachment. and (2) when the President is tried, the Constitution provides that “the Chief Justice shall preside.” What if the Chief Justice disagreed with holding and second trial and simply didn’t preside? These are the things that true Constitutional crises are made of because there is no answer in our Constitution.
The Supreme Court gave him immunity (more or less) from criminal prosecution relating to official acts. Impeachment is not a criminal charge. The court thought impeachment is the proper remedy for crimes by the executive.
Not in the way that I believe you mean. No matter what charges the house levied in the articles of impeachment, he wouldn’t be called before any state or federal criminal judge. He would have to be indicted separately for those crimes, and whether he could be indicted criminally is a big open question that depends on a lot of facts and the nearly arbitrary wishes of the Supreme Court. Welcome to the practice of law before a kangaroo court.
Impeachment proceedings are held as a trial before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with the Senate acting as the jury. The articles of impeachment would say he is charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which are not defined in the constitution and thus have whatever meaning Congress gives to them. (He could also be charged with treason or bribery, but I’ll bet he wouldn’t be). The charges don’t have to map to any crime in the criminal code for which he could be imprisoned. The House could have impeached Obama for the high crime of wearing a tan suit.
I respectfully disagree with your citations. That article talks about criminally trying a person in a criminal court. “Enemies” isn’t defined in the Constitution and any statutory gloss on who is an “enemy” would be subject to consideration solely by the Senate trying in the impeachment proceedings. Trying a person criminally for treason would be subject to the criminal code’s definitions of “treason” and “enemy,” but trying an impeached officer consistent with the Constitutional process wouldn’t require the same adherence to those definitions. Or, you know, what @Si_Amigo said and @Chronos said.
But the Code can’t limit what’s in the Constitution because the Constitution is controlling. If the whatever the Constitution said was supposed to be broader than the U.S. Code definition, then that will prevail. And, in the context of impeachment, the Senate will decide. And the Supreme Court has already said that it can’t review impeachment convictions. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. Impeachment convictions are the quintessential purely political questions beyond the reach of any court. Nixon v. United States (ironically, not about THAT Nixon).
Sadly, I agree.
The Vice President. And it is unlikely you will ever get 2/3 of the House to vote to remove the President unless he is a complete vegetable. The 25th amendment was not meant for this moment and it won’t be applied in this moment.
For this to happen, Dems have to win every Senate seat in the upcoming election and for the blue wave to be so big and so threatening to Senate Republicans that some of them are willing to join Democrats in the removal effort. On a bell curve of voting outcomes in the upcoming election, this outcome is probably seven or eight standard deviations from the mean election prediction. Not technically impossible in the “anything can happen” perspective but effectively impossible.
Had Gerald Ford not been appointed Vice President, Nixon’s presidency would have fallen to the Democratic speaker of the House, Carl Albert. I understand that Ford was confirmed in part because Democrats felt that Republicans would not support removing Nixon from office if it caused the presidency to switch parties. The same would be true today. I don’t think the requisite number of Republicans would support removal of the president and vice president if removing them both meant a Democrat took over.
I think it’s more instructive to point out that impeachment proceedings aren’t legal proceedings. They’re effectively internal Congressional/governmental procedures for removing officials from office.
So as such, anything they feel are “high crimes and misdemeanors” are valid for impeachment, and if impeached, you are booted out of office, without any other penalty.
To me, this implies that the Founding Fathers viewed it more as something done for crimes of honor- stuff like perjury, corruption, etc… where being impeached and booted from office was the penalty because it would impugn your reputation and honor in polite society.
As I already said earlier, impeachment is not a criminal trial, so laws defining what a crime us don’t really apply. So you’re right; whatever the Senate decides, goes.
They didn’t figure on having an actual criminal as president.
Nope. That’s what makes this such a bizarre situation. Nixon was more what they were thinking of when they came up with the Constitutional parts about impeachment, not about actual, overt disregard for the Constitution and outright, overt breaking of the laws.
For my part, Congress are the ones who are the most disappointing in this situation. Trump is who he is, but it’s Congress’ job to rein the President in, and they’re whatever combination of afraid of MAGA/onboard with MAGA/afraid of Trump personally that they’re not doing it. It’s a pretty spectacular display of craven boot licking and cowardice, and one that’s going to render the whole body rather meaningless if they don’t wake up and reassert their power.
IMHO the basic principle, if you can call it that, is that no matter how bad Trump is and no matter how many bad, evil, destructive, unlawful things he does, it would be 10,000 times worse for a Democrat to be president.
These people have convinced themselves of that. So it means they can excuse whatever he does because he is saving the country from being run by Democrats.
That’s all I got.
Which is so false it’s ridiculous. The country didn’t go to hell under Clinton, Obama, or Biden any more than it did under Republican presidents (save Trump).
My guess is that there’s a certain amount of projection going on such that they think that each side’s goal is to enrich their own side and screw the other side, and exact retribution on one’s enemies, critics, and opposition. And nothing else; the idea of making things better for the entire country is foreign to them.
So with that in mind, the idea that their own guy in office is paramount makes some sense, because they are afraid that if anyone else is in office, that they’re in the crosshairs for fuckery. Which isn’t the case, unless a Republican is in office and you’re on the other side.
It didn’t used to be so; that whole retributive notion is a relatively new thing that seems to have come about at about the same time as the Tea Party or maybe a little later.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the beginning? (Paraphrasing Winston Churchill)
From Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack
There are signs the political game has changed in the United States since Hungarian voters rejected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership on Sunday, April 12.
…With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.
…Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.
…
My bold
We shall see.
Go Jamie. A little late, but better than nothing.
I particularly like this part -
OTOH, every time we think something has happened that will force the Republicans to push back against Trump, they managed to shrink down and slither away. Kind of like how cockroaches can get through the tiniest cracks. Anyway I hear the Republican side of the House just ordered several cases of Astroglide. That’s just a rumor though.
We’re all watching and we shall see.
I doubt it will force them to push against Trump, but it will force them to defend his behavior on the record.
Like this? (This paragraph comes after the quote I posted above.)
Today, when asked if he were comfortable with Trump’s threat of last week that an entire civilization would die if it did not meet his demands, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) changed the subject by saying: “You’ve got to…look at what the president is doing, and I think right now he’s trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, which…we are all supportive of.” The strait was, of course, open before Trump attacked Iran.
I assume that was a question by a journalist, I meant defending him in the official record in congress.
I assume too (but I may very well be mistaken) that is harder to do that kind of shuffle while debating a law than to a journalist…
Yep. Richardson’s claim that something significant changed in the U.S. because Orban lost is mistaken.
I’m all for eventually passing a bill to specify a closer to nonpartisan body, rather than the cabinet, for 25th amendment purposes. This should have been done long ago — say, in the Ford administration — when it would have been a good government measure and not seen as targeting the incumbent.
The way things are now, Mike Johnson will not bring the bill to a vote.
What about next year? If the Democrats take both houses, will it be of value to bring the bill back and force Trump to veto it? No. Swing voters will correctly see it as game-playing, just like impeaching when you do not have votes for removal.
P.S. I have a question.
Here’s what the 25th says:
If Congress by law provides another body, does that other body replace just the cabinet? Or does the other body replace both the veep and the cabinet for removal decision purposes?
I think the former, because of the placement of “either” matching with the “or”.
This is the bottom line. Or the punch line.
But they SAY it did, and the talking heads they listen to SAY it did, and that’s good enough for them.
Here in the Great White North, our local MAGAmaples flood every comment section with nonsense about how Canada is now a literal hell-hole, worse that Somalia, is a communist dictatorship, and Carney is the worst prime minister in forever. Why do they say such nonsense? Because this is what they are told to say by our “loyal opposition” party.
Visiting my BIL about 10 years ago, they went to church, my wife and I stayed alone in their house.
They had FOX ‘news’ on all day long. I changed it to CNN because I wanted news, and was also curious how long it would stay on.
It changed back the moment they got home.
Otherwise, I like them very much.