Could Trump Lose Office Again?
With the President impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives for his instigation to storm the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday, there has been some debate among legal experts and members of Congress as to whether Donald Trump could be permanently disqualified. hold public office. again if found guilty.
The impeachment process is a tedious procedure that is characterized by first a vote in the House of Representatives, followed by a trial, and then a vote on a possible Senate conviction. The process is still at an early stage: on Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president for “inciting insurrection” by a margin of 232-197.
If the president is found guilty by a two-thirds majority in the Senate, it will raise the likelihood that the door will slam on Trump’s future political ambitions. According to the wording of the Constitution, a person convicted in the course of impeachment proceedings may be removed from office or subject to “disqualification from holding or holding any honorary, confidential, or commercial office in the United States.”
With the Trump administration running out of time before Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration , the latter opportunity may seem more promising for lawmakers who have sought to prevent the president from potentially running for the GOP nomination in 2024. However, this is quite obvious, but dictated by the interpretation of the Constitution.
In theory, Trump’s disqualification could be done with a simple majority in the Senate.
Removal of the President from office requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate in favor of a conviction. If this is achieved, another disqualification vote will need to be taken. Fortunately for Democrats, there are legal experts who argue that disqualification can be done with a simple majority.
Only three officials have ever been disqualified from office following an impeachment conviction; they were all federal judges. Two of them, West Humphries and Thomas Porteous, were convicted and excluded after the Senate held a two-thirds majority.
Of course, if this were the case for the president, many legal experts say disqualification can only be issued after a two-thirds majority in the Senate has passed a sentence for serious crimes and misconduct. And given the tough 50-50 split among Republicans and Democrats in the House at the moment, it’s unclear if Trump will receive such a punishment.
However, there is no consensus among experts on how disqualification might work. As a recent Reuters spokesman notes:
Paul Campos, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado, said he believed a vote to disqualify Trump could be held even if there were not enough votes to pass a sentence. The US Supreme Court has made it clear that the Senate has broad powers to determine how it conducts trials, he said.
As noted by Vox’s Jan Millheiser , the Supreme Court has not ruled on whether a simple majority applies to disqualification if the convicted party has already been removed from office. But there is a tempting argument that can be applied from the lower criminal courts.
In this sense, the Senate could act as a judge in a smaller criminal proceeding. As Millhister writes :
In criminal proceedings, defendants usually enjoy much less procedural protection at the sentencing stage than at the stage of determining their guilt or innocence. In trials without a possible death sentence, the defendant must be found guilty by a jury, but the sentence can be rendered by a single judge.
Similar logic can be applied to impeachment processes. Before a public official is convicted by the Senate, he enjoys heightened procedural protection and must be found guilty by an overwhelming majority. However, after conviction, they are deprived of this protection, and their sentence can be passed by a simple majority in the Senate.
In the absence of an interpretation put forward by the Supreme Court, this boils down to purely hypothetical at this point. However, the possibility of disqualification for Donald Trump remains real.
The other way: the 14th amendment
A constitutional amendment ratified after the civil war could pose another obstacle to the outgoing president. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that any elected official who “participates in an uprising or rebellion” against the state may be prohibited from holding that office.
In order to initiate the amendment, only a simple majority of votes in favor of both houses would be required, although after that, a bitter litigation is likely to begin. As ABC News legal analyst Keith Shaw recently said , linking to the disqualification amendment will require litigation, and Congress must determine exactly what constitutes “rebellion.”
She said:
I think this will require Congress to pass a law … which says that what happened on January 6, before and around him, was a constitutionally rebellious and thus [Trump] disqualified. They will need to find out why this qualifies as an uprising. What does the uprising in 2021 mean?
It should be reiterated that the entire process is deeply rooted in the interpretation of the Constitution and legal maneuvering. Don’t expect the proceedings to proceed quickly.