Can a President Who Is Impeached Run for a Second Term

Information technology'due south happening again.

Last month, in the final week of then-President Donald Trump's presidency, the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump for a second time, charging him with "incitement of insurrection" for inflaming a pro-Trump mob that attacked and briefly occupied the US Capitol on January 6. Trump's second impeachment trial begins Tuesday, even though he is no longer in office.

So why would lawmakers carp with impeachment? One answer is that removal is not the only sanction available if Trump is bedevilled: The Constitution too permits the Senate to permanently disqualify Trump from holding "whatever office of honor, trust or profit under the Usa."

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has called for the removal of President Trump from office.

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If Trump were to seek the presidency again in four years, he could be the prohibitive favorite in a Republican Party primary. A December Gallup poll shows that Trump has an 87 percent approval rating among Republicans, even though he is quite unpopular with the nation as a whole. Another December poll by Quinnipiac University found that 77 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Trump lost to Biden because of widespread voter fraud — a prevarication that Trump repeated even as his supporters wreaked havoc in the Capitol in January.

Disqualifying Trump from property office, in other words, wouldn't merely eliminate the risk that America's most prominent antagonist of commonwealth would occupy the White Firm once again. Information technology would also brand way for other ambitious Republicans who promise to go president anytime.

How disqualification works

Though Congress has the power to remove public officials via impeachment, this power is rarely used. Including Trump, who was impeached in late 2022 for pressuring Ukraine to intervene in the 2022 ballot, but 20 officials (and simply 3 presidents) have been impeached by the House in all of American history. And, of these twenty impeached individuals, but xi were either bedevilled past the Senate or resigned their office after they were impeached.

The term "impeachment" refers to the Business firm's decision to charge a public official with "loftier crimes and misdemeanors," the phrase the Constitution uses to describe offenses warranting removal of a high official. The Business firm may impeach such an official by a elementary majority vote.

Afterward such a vote, the matter moves to the Senate, which volition conduct a trial and determine whether to convict the impeached official (if the president is impeached, the Chief Justice of the The states shall preside over this trial). Convicting someone who is impeached requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate.

If the impeached official is bedevilled, the Senate then must decide what sanction to impose upon that official. Under the Constitution, "judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend farther than to removal from part, and disqualification to concord and relish any office of award, trust or turn a profit under the United States." And so the Senate finer must make up one's mind whether merely removing the official from role is an advisable sanction, or whether permanent disqualification is warranted.

Although the Congress may simply remove and disqualify a public official, federal prosecutors may still bring criminal charges against that official in federal courtroom.

In all of American history, only three individuals — former federal judges West Humphreys, Robert Archibald, and Thomas Porteous — have been permanently barred from holding future office.

The Constitution is silent on whether, later an official has already been impeached and removed from role, imposing the boosted sanction of disqualification requires a supermajority vote. In the past, however, the Senate adamant that a simple majority vote is sufficient for disqualification. Judge Archibald was butterfingers past a vote of 39-35 after he was removed from office.

To be clear, such a elementary bulk vote may only take identify afterwards the Senate has already voted to convict an impeached official. Two-thirds of the Senate must showtime agree to remove someone from office before that official can exist disqualified — a simple majority cannot, acting on its own, disqualify an official from holding time to come office.

Even if Trump is convicted by the Senate — an unlikely upshot given that the Senate is nevertheless controlled by Republicans — impeachment could only cut Trump's time in role short by a few days.

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The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether elementary majority vote is sufficient to disqualify someone from public office after they've already been removed. Humphreys and Porteous were both disqualified in supermajority votes, and Archibald never brought a example before the Court that could take immune the justices to rule on how many votes are required to disqualify a public official.

Nevertheless, at that place is a stiff ramble argument that the Senate should be allowed to disqualify an individual past a simple majority vote, later on that individual has already been convicted by a 2-thirds bulk.

In criminal trials, defendants typically enjoy far fewer procedural protections during the sentencing phase of their trial than they practice in the stage that determines their guilt or innocence. In trials non involving a possible decease sentence, a defendant must exist convicted by a jury, but the sentence can be handed down past a unmarried judge.

A similar logic could exist applied to impeachment trials. Before a public official is convicted by the Senate, they savor heightened procedural protections and must be found guilty by a supermajority vote. Later they are bedevilled, however, they are stripped of those protections and their sentence may be determined by a elementary majority of the Senate.

In whatsoever effect, overcoming the hurdle of convicting Trump volition be hard. If all l Senate Democrats concord together, they still need to convince at least 17 Republicans to captive Trump. And the overwhelming majority of Republicans already voted to declare Trump's second impeachment trial unconstitutional — so that's not a keen sign for anyone hoping that Trump might be convicted.

The question for Republican senators, however, is whether they want to take chances having Trump equally their standard-bearer in 2024.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/22220495/impeachment-trump-2024-election-bar-from-office

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