Re-impeachment
On Wednesday 6 January, President Trump instructed his supporters to march down to the Capitol and defend the members of Congress who planned to nullify the November 2020 election results. While Trump didn’t explicitly order his followers to break into the Capitol and attack those who were ready to certify his opponent as the victor, he whipped the crowd into a frenzy by asserting that they would “never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” After a months-long campaign to convince his supporters that he had been wronged and he needed “patriots” to prevent him from being forced out of office, they knew what he wanted them to do.
One week later, on Wednesday 13 January, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for having incited insurrection.
Trump thus became the only President in US history to have been re-impeached. He was re-impeachable because he was not convicted and removed a year earlier when the House of Representatives impeached (indicted) him the first time for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Trump was at that time accused of having withheld congressionally allocated aid to a foreign leader unless that foreign leader manufactured evidence to help Trump win the election. Republicans in the first impeachment trial in the US Senate trivialized Trump’s exploitation of office for personal electoral gain. They now have a second chance to recognize that Trump has long been willing to do whatever was necessary to stay in power, including taking American democracy down with him. A failure to convict now would indicate that Trump’s party no longer reliably defends the peaceful transfer of power after a free and fair election.
It would have been far better for the country if Trump had resigned in shame after his supporters attacked Congress, putting an end to his followers’ campaign to keep him in power regardless of the election results. But he is shameless and he would not voluntarily leave office.
It also would have been far better if the Vice-President and Cabinet had invoked the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to immediately remove a dangerous president from power. But Trump’s inner circle had qualified for their jobs by being grovelingly loyal, so they either slunk away while pretending to have resigned on principle, or they acted as though nothing was terribly wrong. The House of Representatives formally asked the Vice President to invoke the 25th Amendment. He refused.
That left impeachment. The first impeachment almost exactly one year ago was based on a straight party-line vote with no Republican support. Re-impeachment brought 10 Republicans (out of 211) across the aisle to vote with the Democrats. But more than 200 Republicans in the House of Representatives thought that a president’s provoking an attack on a joint session of Congress as it was about to certify that the president had lost an election did not qualify as a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Fully 138 members of the House of Representatives and seven Senators had even voted to reject the election results when Congress certified Joe Biden as the election’s winner. Trump is still being backed by much of his party in the “big lie” that he won the 2020 election.
The election certification did go forward and Trump, then, will cease to be president at the appointed time. But he is reported to be angry and resentful while still holding the full power of the presidency, in a Washington DC with 20,000 National Guard troops in the streets to guard against violence from his supporters. The transfer of power will occur against an uneasy peace at best as the current occupant of the presidency still refuses to concede his defeat.
The Impeachment Trial as a Double-Edged Sword
Despite the urgency of removing from office a president who is still eager to deny the results of the election and still willing to stoke violence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to call his chamber back into session to hold a trial.
But why is McConnell still calling the shots? Didn’t the Democrats just win the Senate? Not yet. First, the two newly elected Georgia senators have still to be sworn in, and their elections were not certified until Friday. When they join the Senate, there will be a 50-50 tie. But until Kamala Harris has been sworn in as vice-president on 20 January, Vice-President Pence breaks party ties. So Chuck Schumer only becomes majority leader after the narrowest of narrow majorities is in place. Until then, the Senate is still under Republican control. And it has not acted swiftly to protect the country from a dangerous president.
The second Trump impeachment trial will now take place after Biden’s inauguration and after Trump is gone. Because the immediate danger will have passed, an impeachment trial may seem pointless. Already, Republican legal experts are circling like birds of prey, ready to claim that the Constitution bars holding a trial after the impeached official has left office so Trump should go scot-free. But the historical record clearly says otherwise: three impeachments of sitting officials resulted in trials that took place after they had left government. As long as the impeachment occurs while the person still holds office, the trial can take place later.
Why would it be worth having an impeachment trial after removal from office is moot? Conviction upon impeachment doesn’t just permit removal of a tainted official from office; it also allows the Congress, by a simple majority vote after a conviction, to disqualify that person from holding government office ever again. Moreover, many benefits follow an office-holder out of office. The US President receives a pension, a generous travel allowance, money for an office and staff, a lifetime security detail and more. Conviction after impeachment allows those benefits to be blocked.
A conviction is far from a sure thing, however, as it requires two-thirds of the Senate to agree, and that means that 17 Republicans would have to vote against Trump. But even Mitch McConnell has indicated that he may be open to convicting Trump. He and some of his fellow party members are starting to imagine that their party might better off if they bar Trump’s comeback. As Trump’s immediate power to attack fellow Republicans fades, preventing Trump from running for the presidency again may well appeal to more Republicans than we can now count. So it is not crazy to think that Trump could be convicted. But the result will depend more on calculations of self-interest than on a judgment about the public interest in preserving democratic government.
Whenever it occurs, however, a Senate impeachment trial would tie the entire Senate up in knots for a long time. Presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the trial requires all 100 senators to constitute the jury, which means that every single senator must sit in the Senate chamber all day, every day of the trial, doing nothing else. Trump’s first impeachment trial was rushed because the Republican leadership refused to call witnesses and yet it still ran from 16 January through 5 February 2020. A second impeachment trial is likely to be more complicated and longer, as the Democrats will surely call witnesses and present evidence, even as the charge at the center of the case will be tried before 100 eye-witnesses to the underlying event.
Democrats would control the process this time, but the re-impeachment trial is perilous for them. Trump can still win. Moreover, his right to be heard at the impeachment trial means that he can spin out his crazy claims, rile up his supporters, strike fear into the hearts of his fellow Republicans, and escape punishment again. He will be given the platform of all platforms on which to espouse his version of reality, dominating the media landscape as he so loves to do.
In addition, a second impeachment trial presents an opportunity for Trump to dominate the political process again – this time to destroy his successor’s typically most productive period in office in the first 100 days. If the entire Senate is sitting as a jury on the outrages of a president no longer in office, it cannot hold confirmation hearings to get the new president’s team in place. It cannot legislate. Biden urgently needs the Senate to devote all of its time to his new administration because he starts off behind schedule. But they will be focusing on Trump instead.
Because Trump was unwilling to concede and therefore the Republicans in the Senate were not convinced there would be a transition, precisely none of Biden’s cabinet picks have been confirmed by the Senate yet. So, alone among recent presidents, Biden will take office without a single member of his cabinet ready to join him, despite having made timely nominations. The clear intent of the Republican leadership since the election has been to prevent Biden from being able to govern effectively and perhaps at all. At least some Republicans are now delighted that the rush to impeach Trump again allows Biden’s nominees to be blocked and further delays action on Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda. If Republicans can’t hold the White House, they don’t want Democrats to be able to accomplish anything through their control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. Trying Trump is the perfect way to prevent Biden from being effective.
Because Democrats will be in charge, however, they have been trying to find a way “to walk and chew gum” at the same time. The Senate Parliamentarian has been asked if the Senate can conduct other business in the morning and hold the trial in the afternoon. House Majority Whip James Clyburn has proposed that the trial not start until 100 days into Biden’s term, given that Trump’s departure from office reduces the urgency. The logistics of the trial have not yet been worked out but one hopes that Trump will not continue to set the agenda for the new administration beyond his term in office. Just how the Senate will organize its turn to the overflowing agenda of the new administration and also bring Trump to justice, however, is still an open question.
Evidence of an Insurrection
As I write, less than two weeks have passed since the riot at the Capitol, but we have already learned that what happened there is very different from first impressions. At first, the riots looked like a fraternity’s drunk Halloween party as the mob stormed the Capitol and wandered around aimlessly taking selfies. We now know that the mob also beat up dozens of police (brutally killing one and injuring nearly 60 others), hunted down the Vice President while chanting that they wanted to kill him, ransacked offices of the Democratic leadership of the Congress (including disabling the alarm system through which representatives could have called for help) and stole computers containing classified information. Five people died.
Many people recognized friends and family among the rioters and have come forward to turn them in. Investigators, flooded with new evidence, are now focusing on whether some of those in the mob constituted capture-and-kill teams aiming to kidnap and/or murder Trump’s opponents in Congress. Many in the mob were fitted out with serious weapons. Many former and current military officers as well as police and others with serious professional training in the deployment of violence were among those who breached the Capitol. Far from a pranking set of overzealous “patriots” in ridiculous costumes, the mob now seems to have been far more capable of pulling off a coup than we initially knew.
In addition, it seems increasingly likely that the Capitol Hill riot was an inside job. Some of the Capitol Hill police were ready to open the gates to the marauding hordes. Some police posed for selfies with the rioters and even gave directions to those seeking particular offices. Some of Trump’s partisan defenders in Congress may have assisted the rioters to find their way around by giving unauthorized tours the day before so that they could locate the likely whereabouts of targeted officials. The Defense Department, headed by a recently installed amateur team of Trump’s supporters, limited the ability of the National Guard to respond that day so that there was no effective response for hours. Despite many warnings, security utterly failed because intelligence was never taken seriously. Was it because Trump’s minions in government positions ordered them all to stand down? The question must be answered. Now, inspectors general from the Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and Interior Departments have opened a major investigation into why a clear and serious threat, known well in advance, was met with little planning or effective response. (Inspectors general are independent officials who monitor whether their agencies are acting lawfully.) The House has also opened its own probe. The Senate trial for impeachment should not proceed until we know more about how far the collusion spread. That alone is reason to delay a trial.
A pause before trial will also allow Trump’s 6 January rally speech to be put in perspective. It capped a months-long campaign in which Trump asserted without evidence that the 2020 American election was stolen from him. Trump generated a profusion of unsubstantiated and weirdly specific claims: Dominion-brand voting machines were tampered with by Venezuela; 1500 dead people voted in Nevada; voter turnout was 139% in Detroit. Trump tried to get Democratic ballots thrown out in more than 50 baseless lawsuits that even his own judicial appointees refused to countenance. Then he tried to get state election officials either to “find” additional votes for him or to