Why Remove Trump Now? A Guide to Trump's Impeachment
By Catie Edmondson 48 mins ago
WASHINGTON — The second impeachment of President Trump, coming a week after he egged on a mob of supporters to storm the Capitol, is taking place with extraordinary speed and testing the bounds of the process itself while also raising questions never contemplated before. Here’s what we know.
Impeachment is one of the Constitution’s gravest penalties.
Impeachment is one of the weightiest tools the Constitution gives Congress to hold government officials, including the president, accountable for misconduct and abuse of power.
Members of the House consider whether to impeach the president — the equivalent of an indictment in a criminal case — and members of the Senate consider whether to remove him, holding a trial in which senators act as the jury. The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The House vote requires only a simple majority of lawmakers to agree that the president has, in fact, committed high crimes and misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority.
The charge against Trump is ‘incitement of insurrection.’
The article, drafted by Representatives David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Ted Lieu of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jerrold Nadler of New York, charged Mr. Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” saying he is guilty of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”
The article cited Mr. Trump’s weekslong campaign to falsely discredit the results of the November election, and it quotes directly from the speech he gave on the day of the siege in which he told his supporters to go to the Capitol. “If you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Proponents say impeachment is worthwhile even though Trump has only days left in office.
While the House moved with remarkable speed to impeach Mr. Trump, the Senate trial to determine whether to remove him cannot begin until Jan. 19, his final full day in office. That means any conviction would almost certainly not be completed until after he leaves the White House.
Democrats have argued that Mr. Trump’s offense — using his power as the nation’s leader and commander in chief to incite an insurrection against the legislative branch — is so grave that it must be addressed, even with just a few days remaining in his term. To let it go unpunished, Democrats argued, would set a dangerous precedent of impunity for future presidents.
“Is there little time left?” Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said during the debate. “Yes. But it is never too late to do the right thing.”
Republicans, many of whom voted to overturn the election results, have claimed that going through the impeachment process so late in Mr. Trump’s term will foster unnecessary division and that the country should move on from last week’s siege.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Thursday, January 14th 2021 at 9:39AM
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