The Urgency of a Second Trump Impeachment

In the days after a mob of pro-Trump rioters broke into the Capitol Building, the idea of impeaching President Trump a second time has rapidly gained support among members of Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi backed the idea in a speech on Jan. 7, threatening to impeach the president if he is not quickly stripped of power by his vice president and cabinet through invocation of the 25th Amendment. Multiple drafts of potential articles of impeachment are circulating in the House of Representatives, and according to CNN, the House may move forward with articles of impeachment as soon as Monday, Jan. 11.

This would make Trump the first president to be impeached more than once. It would also mark him as the president impeached the closest to the end of his term: As of today, Jan. 8, there are only 12 days until President-Elect Joe Biden swears the oath of office. The fact that Congress is seriously discussing impeachment even as the clock on Trump’s term ticks down emphasizes just how alarmed members have become by Trump’s unpredictable behavior as he struggles to hold onto power. “Any day” remaining in Trump’s term “can be a horror show for America,” Pelosi told reporters.

In parsing this rapidly accelerating news cycle, it’s helpful to draw some distinctions between Trump’s original impeachment in December 2019 and the impeachment being proposed in Congress now. The former was a moral necessity, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it was doomed to fail in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latter is the answer to a almost entirely pragmatic question: How do we get this dangerous and volatile person off the national stage as quickly as possible—and keep him from returning to any federal office?

The Constitution seems to frame impeachment as a choice by Congress: a matter of discretion, not of obligation. But after the Mueller report was published in 2019, I was among a number of commentators who argued that impeaching Trump was both a moral and constitutional requirement. There are some abuses of power that are just so vile that they require Congress to take up the responsibility for impeachment established under the Constitution and take action against the president who has committed them. Trump’s willingness to accept help from actors linked to the Russian government during the 2016 election, and his many efforts to hamstring the Mueller investigation and turn the Justice Department into a weapon against his enemies, fit that bill.

Congress, obviously, did not agree—and Trump did not face impeachment for the actions detailed in the Mueller report, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear that he had written the report with the intention of passing the baton to Congress. But when Trump was impeached only six months later for his efforts to extort the government of Ukraine, the House of Representatives incorporated his past conduct into the articles of impeachment against him, noting that his threats to Ukraine and his efforts to undermine the congressional investigations of those threats were “consistent with President Trump’s previous efforts” to solicit foreign interference and hamstring the work of those seeking to hold him accountable. “If we do not act now, we would be derelict in our duty,” Pelosi said at the time. “It’s tragic [that] the president’s reckless actions make impeachment necessary. He gave us no choice.”

There was very little likelihood during Trump’s first impeachment that the Republican-controlled Senate would vote to convict and remove the president from office. No impeached president has ever been removed—Richard Nixon almost certainly would have been, but he resigned before the House was able to impeach him—and the constitutional requirement that two-thirds of all senators vote to remove a president sets a high bar even when that chamber is not controlled by a political party slavishly loyal to the chief executive. Nevertheless, pursuing an impeachment for L’Affaire Ukrainienne, even though it was destined to fail, was valuable because it drew a line: It established that Trump’s actions were, in the view of the House of Representatives, a breach of his oath and beyond the pale for what the United States should accept in its presidents. It marked Trump as one of only three presidents who have been impeached, a spiritual heir of sorts of Andrew Johnson. And it put all Senate Republicans but one on the record as supporting the president’s behavior, or at least arguing that his behavior was not enough to keep him from governing. “Your name will be tied to [Trump’s] with a cord of steel for all of history,” argued House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, one of the House impeachment managers, in his closing arguments.

The current impeachment discussions have a different flavor. Trump’s rhetoric of a stolen election, his suggestion on Jan. 6 that his followers should march to the Capitol, his reported unwillingness to respond to the riot—all these are egregious violations of the president’s oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” and justify impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. But this potential second impeachment is a matter more of pragmatism than of stating national moral commitments.

Trump has committed so many impeachable offenses that the charges at issue in the first impeachment became a synecdoche for all his wrongdoing, a way to mark that not just this behavior but this person was unacceptable as a president. The way Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine echoes backwards and forwards across his presidency—both recalling his 2017 conversations with FBI Director James Comey and presaging his 2021 bullying of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state—drives this point home. “You will not change him,” said Schiff in his closing arguments. “You cannot constrain him. He is who he is.” For this reason, the first impeachment had a unique and uniquely important moral force.

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