When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach former President Donald Trump (R) on a charge of “incitement of insurrection,” it set us up for a new constitutional conundrum that I did not address in my previous analysis. At the time, when Trump was still president, I looked at what impeachment is, how it should be used, and the charge itself. I concluded, for reasons described in depth there:

Because the House voted to impeach, the U.S. Senate would normally take it up and hold an impeachment trial under the established process. We’ve used it three times before—against President Andrew Johnson (D), President Bill Clinton (D), and Trump after his first impeachment. What makes this time unique is that Trump’s term is over; he is no longer president.

Now we have to answer a new constitutional question: Can we put a former president on trial?

Read more . . .

In December 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump (R) on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. After an inexplicable delay, the articles were eventually submitted to the U.S. Senate, which voted in February 2020 to acquit on both counts.

My intention had been to seriously review the articles well before the Senate took them up. I was going to produce an analysis similar to the one I produced on the question of whether the Mueller report revealed any obstruction of justice by Trump. I had it outlined and had gotten part-way into it, but then there was a death in the family, other things came up, and before I got everything back in order COVID-19 happened. And by the time I got everything back in order again, the news cycle had long passed me by and impeachment was but a distant memory . . . or so I thought.

I still planned to come back to it. It needs the analysis and consideration that I never had time to give to it. But now, in the waning days of the Trump presidency, he has been impeached again (in the wake of the siege at the Capitol), and there has been serious political discussion of invoking the Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. So here we are again.

First, I’m going to handle impeachment. I’ll explain the conditions under which it should be used, and review, in turn, the two articles of impeachment from 2019 and the one that was passed by the House of Representatives earlier today. [Note: this article has since been updated and includes details about Trump’s second acquittal.].

Second, I am going to handle Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. I’ll explain the conditions for its use and whether or not recent events would justify it being invoked against Trump.

Read more . . .