Can a President Who Has Been Impeached by the House Still Run for President

It's happening once more.

Last calendar month, in the final week of then-President Donald Trump'due south presidency, the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump for a 2nd time, charging him with "incitement of insurrection" for inflaming a pro-Trump mob that attacked and briefly occupied the United states Capitol on Jan half dozen. Trump's second impeachment trial begins Tuesday, fifty-fifty though he is no longer in office.

And so why would lawmakers carp with impeachment? One answer is that removal is not the only sanction available if Trump is convicted: The Constitution also permits the Senate to permanently disqualify Trump from holding "whatsoever part of honor, trust or profit nether the U.s.."

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

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

If Trump were to seek the presidency again in four years, he could exist the prohibitive favorite in a Republican Political party chief. A Dec Gallup poll shows that Trump has an 87 percentage approval rating among Republicans, even though he is quite unpopular with the nation as a whole. Another December poll past Quinnipiac University constitute that 77 pct 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 Jan.

Disqualifying Trump from holding office, in other words, wouldn't just eliminate the risk that America's most prominent adversary of commonwealth would occupy the White House once again. It would besides make way for other ambitious Republicans who hope to get president someday.

How disqualification works

Though Congress has the power to remove public officials via impeachment, this ability is rarely used. Including Trump, who was impeached in tardily 2022 for pressuring Ukraine to arbitrate in the 2022 ballot, only 20 officials (and simply three presidents) have been impeached by the Business firm in all of American history. And, of these 20 impeached individuals, only 11 were either convicted by the Senate or resigned their office after they were impeached.

The term "impeachment" refers to the House'southward decision to accuse a public official with "high 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 simple majority vote.

After such a vote, the matter moves to the Senate, which will bear a trial and decide whether to captive the impeached official (if the president is impeached, the Primary Justice of the United 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 convicted, the Senate then must decide what sanction to impose upon that official. Nether the Constitution, "judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend farther than to removal from function, and disqualification to hold and savor any function of laurels, trust or profit under the U.s.." And so the Senate effectively must decide whether merely removing the official from role is an advisable sanction, or whether permanent disqualification is warranted.

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

In all of American history, only 3 individuals — old federal judges Westward Humphreys, Robert Archibald, and Thomas Porteous — take been permanently barred from holding hereafter function.

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

To be articulate, such a simple bulk vote may simply take place later on the Senate has already voted to convict an impeached official. Ii-thirds of the Senate must first agree to remove someone from office earlier that official can be disqualified — a simple majority cannot, acting on its own, disqualify an official from holding future office.

Even if Trump is convicted past the Senate — an unlikely effect given that the Senate is still controlled past Republicans — impeachment could just cut Trump'due south fourth dimension in office short by a few days.

Caroline Brehman/CQ-Coil Telephone call via Getty Images

The Supreme Courtroom has not ruled on whether simple majority vote is sufficient to disqualify someone from public function after they've already been removed. Humphreys and Porteous were both butterfingers in supermajority votes, and Archibald never brought a case before the Courtroom that could have allowed the justices to rule on how many votes are required to disqualify a public official.

Nevertheless, there is a strong constitutional argument that the Senate should be allowed to disqualify an private by a simple bulk vote, later that individual has already been convicted past a two-thirds bulk.

In criminal trials, defendants typically enjoy far fewer procedural protections during the sentencing phase of their trial than they exercise in the phase that determines their guilt or innocence. In trials not involving a possible expiry sentence, a defendant must be convicted past a jury, but the judgement tin can be handed downward by a single judge.

A similar logic could exist practical to impeachment trials. Before a public official is convicted by the Senate, they enjoy heightened procedural protections and must be institute guilty by a supermajority vote. Later they are bedevilled, withal, they are stripped of those protections and their judgement may be determined by a simple majority of the Senate.

In any upshot, overcoming the hurdle of convicting Trump will be difficult. If all 50 Senate Democrats hold together, they withal need to convince at least 17 Republicans to captive Trump. And the overwhelming majority of Republicans already voted to declare Trump's 2d impeachment trial unconstitutional — and so that'south not a bully sign for anyone hoping that Trump might be bedevilled.

The question for Republican senators, withal, is whether they want to risk having Trump as 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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