Can a President Serve a Second Term While Impeacted
On Washington
Could Trump Serve a Second Term if Ousted? It'due south Up to the Senate
Everyone knows the Senate tin can remove a president, just a 2d, bottom-known vote could disqualify someone from future role birthday.
WASHINGTON — With chances rapidly increasing that President Trump will be impeached by the House and tried in the Senate, an intriguing question has reared its head: Could he be ousted just to try to return to the White Business firm in 2022 in a Trumpian bid for redemption and revenge?
Like then much of the coming impeachment showdown, that decision rests entirely with the Senate. The Constitution famously grants senators the sole ability to convict and remove a president — something that has never been done. What is seldom discussed is a more than obscure clause of the Constitution that allows the Senate discretion to take a second, fifty-fifty more punitive stride, to disqualify the person it convicts from property "any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States."
Imposing that penalisation would effectively bar the president from reclaiming his erstwhile job. In an added twist, tacking on the extra penalization requires only a bulk vote in the Senate, not the two-thirds — or 67 senators — required to convict.
For now, the idea of disqualifying Mr. Trump is the remotest of hypotheticals, since information technology would first require the Senate to vote to impeach and remove him. That seems far-fetched, given how footling appetite Republicans in the chamber take shown so far for deserting him, despite the flood of damaging revelations that have come forth in the impeachment enquiry. Merely if nearly two dozen Republicans did vote to impeach him, it would take only a simple majority to blackball him from the presidency for life.
The little-known constitutional quirk — which has been applied unevenly in the cases of federal judges removed from function — is only one example of what tin happen in the freewheeling process of a presidential impeachment, an exceedingly rare and constantly evolving proceeding that is replete with untested precedents.
The likelihood of an impeachment trial has senators and aides reading up on the process, with a lot to digest. Uncertainty is rife. Could the Senate censure Mr. Trump as an alternative to ousting him, a proposal that was defeated on procedural grounds during the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton? Is a movement to dismiss the articles of impeachment in order — and if so, when?
Then in that location are much larger questions. Could new revelations near Mr. Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals shake Republicans from strongly backing him? How would Congress impose its volition on the president, and would he comply? Would the courts intervene and what would they accept to say?
Some constitutional scholars wonder whether the disqualification clause even applies to a president, but the consensus is that it was written precisely for that purpose when the authors of the Constitution gathered in Philadelphia in 1787.
"If we know anything about what the framers were peculiarly thinking of when they were drafting the impeachment clauses, it was that they had the president clearly in mind," said Frank O. Bowman III, a ramble law professor at the University of Missouri and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Historic period of Trump."
Now 73, Mr. Trump might not even be interested in running again if he were ousted by a Senate dominated by members of his ain party. But for a president who is always spoiling for a fight, it might be sugariness payback to be re-elected by voters afterwards Democratic and Republican lawmakers banded together to requite him the kicking.
At least one constitutional adept said that given the nature of the allegations against Mr. Trump — that he abused his power to enlist foreign assistance in adjacent twelvemonth'southward election — disqualifying him would be an illogical penalty.
"If the impeachment is based on the Ukraine phone call and activeness around that, and the idea is that he is improperly using his office to get dirt on his opponent, the remedy to that is to remove him from office," said Edward B. Foley, an election law say-so and constitutional police professor at the Ohio State Academy'due south Moritz College of Law. "If the fearfulness is the incumbent can't fight a off-white fight, then disable the candidate'southward ability to non wage a off-white fight."
Of the eight federal judges who have been removed from the bench for crimes or misconduct, just three were butterfingers from future part. The well-nigh notable person who was not barred was Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida. Mr. Hastings, a old federal district estimate, was tossed out by the Senate in 1989 on blackmail accusations despite being acquitted in a criminal trial, only to be elected in 1992 to the Business firm, where he still serves. (Some scholars argue that an ousted federal officeholder could non be barred from running for Congress in any outcome.)
The instance of Mr. Hastings was a cautionary tale for congressional officials handling the impeachment in 2010 of Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of Louisiana on bribery and perjury charges. They made sure to not simply convict and remove the estimate, but to disqualify him every bit well.
All the same disqualification remained something of an afterthought, and the Senate nearly missed its chance to do and then. Later the vote to convict Mr. Porteous, which automatically carries the penalisation of removal from office, senators raced for the exits amid confusion over whether a 2d vote was needed on the hereafter ban. It turned out one was, and senators were called back to cast a hasty vote of disqualification, which passed 94 to two.
That overwhelming margin was not needed. The Senate has concluded, based on its own precedents, that disqualification can be done with a simple majority. The Constitution explicitly requires a ii-thirds vote for conviction, merely does not specify the margin needed for disqualification, so parliamentarians take ruled that the default for Senate votes is sufficient.
Some scholars believe that such a potentially significant penalty should crave a more definitive vote, arguing that a two-thirds supermajority should exist the standard for both punishments.
"It should be invoked through the aforementioned kind of vote," said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional police professor at the Academy of North Carolina and writer of "Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know."
"It is non articulate why 1 should exist easier than the other," he added.
The lower threshold has driven some speculation that fifty-fifty if the Senate did not convict Mr. Trump, information technology might still be able to disqualify him from future office on a simple majority vote. Only that notion is generally dismissed as unconstitutional, since the ban on future role has to flow out of conviction on manufactures of impeachment.
"Information technology is a sentencing provision," Mr. Bowman said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/us/trump-senate-presidency.html
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