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katherineharron

Calls grow in Congress for Trump to be removed by impeachment or the 25th amendment - C... - 0 views

  • A growing number of lawmakers -- including from Democratic leadership -- are calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office either through impeachment or the 25th Amendment to the Constitution after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday.
  • Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put out a statement Thursday denouncing the "insurrection" at the Capitol "incited by the President," and saying, "This President should not hold office one day longer."
  • "I join the Senate Democratic leader in calling on the Vice President to remove this President by immediately invoking the 25th Amendment," Pelosi said.
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  • Invoking the 25th Amendment would require Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office" -- an unprecedented step.
  • "The most immediate way to ensure the President is prevented from causing further harm in coming days is to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office. As history watches, I urge Vice President Pence and the President's cabinet to put country before party and act," she said in a statement.
  • House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, on Thursday backed removing Trump from office either through the 25th Amendment or impeachment.
  • "Invoking the 25th Amendment is the quickest way to do this, and expedience must be our goal," she said, adding, "If the Vice President and Cabinet fail to act, we have a duty to pursue impeachment."
  • All four members of the progressive "squad" of Democratic lawmakers -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley -- have also spoken out in support of impeachment in the wake of the violent siege of the Capitol.
  • With Biden's inauguration date fast approaching on January 20, it is highly unlikely that there would be adequate time or political will in Congress for any kind of impeachment effort.
  • In order to remove a President from office through impeachment, the Senate must vote to convict after an impeachment trial. That did not happen in the GOP-controlled Senate where Trump was ultimately acquitted.
katherineharron

House to vote on resolution calling to remove President Trump from office by the 25th A... - 0 views

  • The House of Representatives is expected to vote Tuesday on a measure calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office through the 25th Amendment in the wake of the violent siege of the US Capitol last week.
  • The resolution, brought forward by Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, calls on Vice President Mike Pence "to immediately use his powers under section 4 of the 25th Amendment to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments in the Cabinet to declare what is obvious to a horrified nation: That the President is unable to successfully discharge the duties of his office."
  • Approval of the resolution by the Democratic-led House will stand as a symbolic rebuke to the President as many lawmakers are furious and reeling from the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
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  • Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience,"
  • House Democrats plan to vote Wednesday to impeach Trump
  • It comes as House Democrats are now moving rapidly toward impeaching the President for a second time as a result of the insurrection, which Trump incited after repeatedly making false claims that the election had been stolen from him
  • The House will vote Tuesday evening on the resolution urging Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, and then will plan to vote Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET on the impeachment resolution, Hoyer said.
  • Invoking the 25th Amendment would require Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office" -- an unprecedented step. Pence has so far given no indication that he would take that action.
  • Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Pence a day after the Capitol attack to discuss the 25th Amendment -- but Pence never took the call after they were on hold for 25 minutes.
  • In her statement on Monday, Pelosi said that as a "next step," House Democrats "will move forward with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor."
  • Pelosi accused House Republicans of "enabling the President's unhinged, unstable and deranged acts of sedition to continue," adding, "Their complicity endangers America, erodes our Democracy, and it must end."
katherineharron

25th Amendment: What is it and how does it work? - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump only has two weeks left in office, but after he fomented an assault by rioters on the US Capitol, some Republicans are actively considering whether to remove him in these final throes of his administration.
  • Impeaching Trump might be the appropriate remedy and using impeachment to remove him from office would bar him from running for President again. But there's likely no time to impeach and try the President again in the next two weeks.
  • A second option is invoking the 25th Amendment, which has periodically been discussed as a means of last resort to remove a rogue or incapacitated president.Some Cabinet members held preliminary discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment to force Trump's removal from office, a GOP source told CNN's Jim Acosta Wednesday night.
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  • To forcibly wrest power from Trump, Vice President Mike Pence would have to be on board, according to the text of the amendment
  • Pence would also need either a majority of Trump's Cabinet officials to agree the President is unfit for office and temporarily seize power from him.
  • Pence and the Cabinet would then have four days to dispute him, Congress would then vote -- it requires a two-thirds supermajority, usually 67 senators and 290 House members to permanently remove him.
  • House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during the last Congress, introduced a bill to create a congressional body for this purpose, but it was not signed into law.
  • The 25th Amendment was enacted in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose predecessor Dwight Eisenhower suffered major heart attacks. It was meant to create a clear line of succession and prepare for urgent contingencies.
  • The portion of the 25th Amendment that allows the vice president and Cabinet to remove the president had in mind a leader who was in a coma or suffered a stroke
  • The storming of the Capitol by rioters at the request of the President may end up being the first such contingency in the nation's history.
  • "Our country's being held hostage right now by Donald Trump," he said. "Mitch McConnell and Speaker Pelosi cannot even meet in the Capitol today ... so I think we now have to go into our constitutional kit bag and find what we can do to control Donald Trump and certainly the 25th Amendment is there."
anonymous

Max Burns: Removing Trump through impeachment or the 25th Amendment is warranted. But t... - 0 views

  • Though rarely used and often overlooked, the 14th Amendment could be the key to preventing a president who contributed to a domestic terrorist attack from ever receiving a position of public office again.
  • he president of the United States meets all the criteria for being permanently barred from public office under even a rigid originalist reading of the third section of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War as a way to expel public officials who sided with Confederate insurrectionists over the union.
  • The benefit of the 14th Amendment over impeachment is that it allows Democrats to hold Trump accountable without the need to gather a bipartisan supermajority of senators, which lawmakers say is unlikely because Republican obstruction has defined nearly every effort to bind Trump to the rule of law.
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  • The main drawback — the 14th Amendment's lack of a removal clause — could be remedied through well-deserved impeachment, though Trump's departure in a week will make this issue moot.
  • Invoking the 14th Amendment could well garner more Republican support. On Monday evening, GOP Rep. Tom Reed of New York published an op-ed in The New York Times making his case for avoiding impeachment. "Work with us on constitutionally viable alternatives," Reed pleaded. Those include "censure, criminal proceedings, and actions under the 14th Amendment."
  • But there's an underlying point that should be carefully considered: The 14th Amendment was crafted in times of division not entirely unlike our own.
  • "The language in Section Three applies to anybody who has made an oath to the Constitution and then violates that oath," Eric Foner, a Civil War historian and Columbia University professor emeritus, told The Washington Post. "It's pretty simple."
  • The case for applying the language to Trump may also be clearer than that of impeachment, because the 14th Amendment's permanent ban on future public service emphasizes for all future generations the severity of Trump's treachery and doesn't require the Senate to take a separate vote, as during the impeachment process.
  • That's not to say there won't be challenges to invoking the 14th Amendment. Any effort to hold Trump accountable is likely to face strong Republican opposition, though the extremity of Trump's conduct seems to be fracturing party loyalties.
  • Realistically, pursuing this path would also rule out an already unlikely impeachment conviction in the Senate, yet with Democrats moving forward on the early stages of impeachment, leadership might be uninterested in shifting approaches.
  • It can be dispiriting to see that the threat of violent antidemocratic terrorism is as real in our enlightened modernity as it was in the wake of the Civil War.
martinelligi

Watch Live: House Votes On Resolution Urging Pence To Invoke 25th Amendment : Congress ... - 0 views

  • Vice President Pence says he won't invoke the 25th Amendment against President Trump, days after violent pro-Trump extremists breached the U.S. Capitol.
  • "I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with our Constitution," Pence writes. He says the amendment is "not a means of punishment or usurpation," and that invoking it would "set a terrible precedent."
  • Still, the resolution is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled House. Trump "widely advertised and broadly encouraged" the protests that led to last week's violence, the resolution argues, and then ignored calls to condemn his supporters' actions swiftly. It also cites his repeated efforts to delegitimize the presidential election results with false claims of widespread voter fraud.
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  • The vote comes as Democrats in the House have also filed an impeachment resolution charging Trump with fomenting the insurrection.
  • With Pence's response to the 25th Amendment resolution, the House plans to move forward with impeachment proceedings. Trump is just the third U.S. president to have been impeached. He would be the only one to have been impeached twice.
  • In a news conference Tuesday, Schumer said he's asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to call the Senate back into session immediately to begin a likely impeachment trial.
katherineharron

Pence and Trump finally speak after post-riot estrangement - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Vice President Mike Pence received a memento from his aides the other day: the engraved chair set aside for him in the White House Cabinet Room, hauled over-the-shoulder from the West Wing and delivered to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for one of his final staff meetings.
  • Instead of applause, many of Trump's aides -- even those who have stuck with him through myriad scandals and embarrassments -- were voicing shame and disappointment. His circle has shrunk. Many have resigned and others are still considering it.
  • On Monday, after an extended period of silence, Trump and Pence spoke for the first time after a deadly riot of Trump supporters broke out at the US Capitol with Pence inside, according to two administration officials.
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  • "They reiterated that those who broke the law and stormed the Capitol last week do not represent the America First movement backed by 75 million Americans, and pledged to continue the work on behalf of the country for the remainder of their term," the senior official said.
  • Trump had spent the weekend largely in isolation, as aides either distanced themselves from him or limited their time in his presence. Trump canceled a planned trip to Camp David, where his closest aides were hoping he would get into a good mindset ahead of his final stretch in office.
  • The mob event, and Trump's fury at Pence in the lead-up to it, left their relationship in tatters. Before their Oval Office meeting Monday, the pair had not spoken since before Trump's rally on the Ellipse last week. Their last conversation was punctuated by a vulgarity the President uttered after Pence informed him, for a final time, that he could not unilaterally reject the results of the election, something he had already told Trump in previous meetings that often dragged on for hours.
  • Pence finally got "a glimpse of POTUS' vindictiveness," one source familiar with the situation said, using the acronym for President of the United States.
  • And while Pence now appears unlikely to entertain invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, he has not weighed in on it publicly, allowing the idea to persist, which people close to him described as intentional.
  • Pence, who is often internally mocked for how deferential he is toward Trump, has taken a quiet but defiant stance in their final days in office.
  • The attempted insurrection that Trump incited at the US Capitol last week prompted the permanent suspension of his Twitter account, a looming second impeachment and a wave of administration resignations
  • It was the first time in their more than four years as political partners that Trump's vengeance had been trained on a man known mostly for his fealty. Even as others once close to Trump -- from his personal attorney Michael Cohen to his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to any manner of former aides -- met similar fates, Pence was spared.
  • The final conversation left Trump irate, and his anger emerged during the rally itself, when he told the crowd he hoped "Mike has the courage to do what he has to do" and ignores "the stupid people that he's listening to."
  • Pence also recently learned that pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell was involved in the lawsuit filed by Trump's Republican allies against him. Trump was not only aware, but had encouraged the effort, people close to the situation said.
  • Even when the President returned to the White House while his crowd set off for the Capitol, Trump's anger at Pence did not abate. And as the crowd broke down doors, mobbed the building, and in some cases appeared to be hunting Pence himself, Trump remained focused on the perceived disloyalty.
  • After Wednesday's events, Pence allies were aghast the President did not call to ensure the vice president's safety, or the safety of his wife and daughter, who had accompanied him as he performed the ceremonial role of overseeing the Electoral College tally.
  • "Was he concerned at all that an angry mob that he commanded to march on the Capitol might injure the vice president or his family?" a person familiar with the matter asked.
  • Pence's actions earned him praise within the administration, including from national security adviser Robert O'Brien, who tweeted on Wednesday that Pence "is a genuinely fine and decent man. He exhibited courage today."
  • Democrats, however, remain frustrated at Pence's unwillingness to move on the 25th Amendment, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
  • Other Democrats are skeptical that after four years of standing by Trump -- including through his attempts to cast doubt on the election results using false claims of voter fraud -- Pence can recover his moral standing now.
  • A day later, an attempt by House Democrats to bring up a resolution urging Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power was blocked by Republicans. If that resolution ends up failing, Democrats plan to to vote Wednesday to impeach Trump for his role in the Capitol riot.
  • Advisers have said Pence hopes to provide a bridge to the next administration and do as much as possible to assist Biden's team in preparing for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Pence and Biden consulted regularly in the early days of the Trump administration, including on foreign policy matters.
  • On Monday, Pence's schedule listed a coronavirus task force meeting -- one of the final times the group meets before the end of the administration. Pence did not bring up the siege at the Capitol during the discussion, a person close to the task force said.
anonymous

House To Take Up Impeachment For Trump's Role In Capitol Mob : NPR - 0 views

  • With just nine days left before President Trump's term comes to an end, the House of Representatives is forging ahead with plans to try to remove the president from office following his role in his supporters' violent attack on the U.S. Capitol last week.
  • In a letter to her Democratic caucus Sunday evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the House would attempt to pass a resolution on Monday calling on Vice President Pence to mobilize the Cabinet and invoke the 25th Amendment, thereby relieving Trump of his duties.
  • it is expected that a Republican lawmaker will object. Should there be an objection, Pelosi told her members the House will seek to debate and vote on the resolution on Tuesday.
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  • Pelosi said she's asking Pence to respond within 24 hours, and then Democrats would proceed with impeachment legislation, which would arrive more than a year after they impeached Trump for his role in the Ukraine affair.
  • House Democrats already have an impeachment resolution drafted, which cites both Trump's incitement of his supporters on Wednesday and his call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump encouraged the official to "find" enough votes to overturn the election in the state.
  • it was likely the House would take up the vote on Tuesday or Wednesday but suggested it could be months before the impeachment measure, should it pass, is sent to the Senate — a move that would enable the upper chamber to begin acting on President-elect Joe Biden's early legislative agenda and confirm his Cabinet nominees before undertaking a trial.
  • removing Trump from office is unlikely — if not impossible. If the narrowly divided Senate still sought to vote to convict Trump, it could also seek to bar him from holding office in the future.
  • The effort to remove Trump from office was set in motion on Jan. 7, when Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., lambasted Trump for his role in the violence and pandemonium the day before, and called for his removal via the 25th Amendment.
  • He later described it as "a heinous attack," without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the role he played in inciting the crowd.
  • Trump's actions prompted immediate calls for his removal from both political opponents and some Republicans once considered allies.
  • Pelosi and Schumer called on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and said if he failed to do so, Congress was prepared to move forward with impeachment.
  • Judd Deere has called the impeachment effort "politically motivated" and said it would "only serve to further divide our great country."
clairemann

Pelosi To Proceed With Impeachment, Calls On Pence To Invoke 25th Amendment | HuffPost - 0 views

  • Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that Democrats will bring articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the House of Representatives floor in the coming days.
  • “In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both,” Pelosi said. “As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”
  • “We are calling on the Vice President to respond within 24 hours,” Pelosi added.
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  • If the House formally levies articles of impeachment against Trump, it will be a remarkable moment in American history. No president has ever been impeached twice, and while it’s unclear if the Senate would move to remove Trump from office, a growing number of Republicans have voiced support for seeing him out of power before his term is done.
  • Pence is said to oppose invoking the 25th Amendment, and he has been one of the president’s longest and most loyal supporters throughout his administration.
  • At least six people — four riot participants and two Capitol Police officers — have died in connection with the attack. 
  • A draft of the House Democrats’ impeachment articles leaked Friday, showing they planned to cite a speech Trump gave to his supporters in Washington, D.C., before the crowd turned toward the Capitol.“There, he reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide,’” the draft said. “He also willfully made statements that encouraged ― and foreseeably resulted in ― imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”
aidenborst

Trump impeachment: Democrats promise quick move to impeachment if 25th Amendment push f... - 0 views

  • Pelosi said the House will attempt to pass a resolution by unanimous consent Monday morning calling for Pence and Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office.
  • The resolution will call on Pence to respond within 24 hours and, if not, the House would move to impeach the President.
  • "In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both. As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action," Pelosi said.
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  • House Democrats are still discussing whether a vote to impeach Trump could be Tuesday or Wednesday, per aides.
  • "We'll take the vote that we should take in the House, and (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) will make the determination as to when is the best time to get that vote and get the managers appointed and move that legislation over to the Senate," Clyburn told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."
  • "It just so happens that if it didn't go over there for 100 days, it could -- let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running, and maybe we'll send the articles sometime after that," the South Carolina Democrat added.
  • By impeaching and removing Trump, even at this late stage of his term, the Senate could subsequently vote to disqualify him from ever holding federal office again, taking an extraordinary action against a former president.
  • The comments from Clyburn come as Democrats grapple with how impeaching Trump for a second time could impact Biden's early days in office, when he is working to get administration appointments approved in the Senate and tackling legislative priorities, like another coronavirus relief package.
  • Pelosi said in a interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" set to air Sunday evening that she liked the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment "because it gets rid of him," but explained, "one of the motivations people have for advocating for impeachment" is to prevent Trump from holding office again.
  • "There's strong support in the Congress for impeaching the President a second time," she said.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell previously made clear in a memo that even if the House moved in the coming days to impeach Trump, the Senate would not return to session before January 19. That would place the start of the trial on January 20 -- the date of Biden's inauguration.
  • Democrats plan to introduce their impeachment resolution, which already has more than 190 co-sponsors, on Monday and sources tell CNN that the party is looking at having votes no sooner than Wednesday but they are still sorting out their plans.
  • "The train has left the station on impeachment," an official close to Biden told CNN. "Trying to stop it would not only fail, but put Biden on the wrong foot with progressives and most Democrats across the party."
  • Already, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in making clear they want Trump to leave office, though not all agree that impeachment is the right option.
  • Sen. Pat Toomey told Tapper Sunday that he thinks Trump should resign. The Pennsylvania Republican -- now the second Republican US senator to call for Trump's resignation -- had previously said he thinks Trump "committed impeachable offenses," but that he wasn't sure removing him this close to the end of his term was the right course of action.
  • Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Friday that the President should step down from office, telling the Anchorage Daily News of Trump, "I want him out. He has caused enough damage."
  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, meanwhile, has endorsed invoking the 25th Amendment, which would force Trump's removal.
martinelligi

What happens if the President of the United States can't serve? (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • But the 25th Amendment, fortunately, is both clear and specific about what happens if the president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." That may be because the 25th Amendment is one of the newest on the books, proposed in 1965 and ratified in 1967, shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (which raised questions about what would happen if a president was rendered comatose).
  • After this certification, the vice president assumes the powers of the presidency. The president, in turn, can contest this by certifying to congressional leaders that "no inability exists," at which point he returns to power -- but it's not necessarily over at that point.
  • There also is no clear answer as to whether and when we go into succession if the president has passed away or is incapacitated and the vice president is alive but incapacitated. And, while the Presidential Succession Act specifies that the speaker of the House and Senate president pro tempore are third and fourth in line to the presidency, followed by the secretary of state, there is a constitutional question about whether congressional leaders can properly assume the presidency by succession, or whether the secretary of state should properly be next in line after the vice president.
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  • Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that Congress passes and the President signs legislation postponing the 2020 general election, the date can only be pushed back so far. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution requires that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on January 20. The Constitution can, of course, be amended, but that requires votes of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, plus ratification from three-fourths of all state legislatures. That simply is not going to happen, either as a political or practical matter, before January 2021.
katherineharron

One day until Trump's second impeachment vote: What happens now - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The next few days are going to be long, but by the end of Wednesday, we expect that President Donald Trump will be impeached a second time.
  • The US Capitol has become a fortress in Washington as Democrats -- keenly aware that a new President will be inaugurated in just eight days -- grapple with how to curtail the damage that could be done by the outgoing man in the White House.
  • there is no stopping impeachment now.
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  • Senate Democrats are working through how it might unfold and President Joe Biden is acknowledging that his opening days in office may be divided between his agenda to bring the country together and a Senate impeachment trial that will continue to keep the country divided.
  • at 11 a.m. ET, the committee is going to begin debate on Rep. Jamie Raskin's bill urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
  • The House Committee is the hottest ticket in town Tuesday.
  • For context, the last impeachment Rules debate lasted about eight hours.
  • she told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience," a source told CNN.
  • Democrats are confident there will be at least a handful of Republicans voting with them on impeachment Wednesday. All eyes are on No. 3 Republican Liz Cheney who has made no secret of her frustrations with President Donald Trump over the years, but comes from conservative Wyoming.
  • The House will pass the rule to govern the debate on the impeachment article Tuesday night at some point. When that occurs is not clear. But, Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET, the House will meet to begin consideration of the article of impeachment on the House floor. Exact timing for final vote Wednesday TBD.
  • Also watch Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois. And, Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican who told CNN on Monday night "I had a break on Wednesday around 4:17 p.m. ... The one person who could tamp down the rhetoric , the one person who could have put an end to that violence, the President, he put out that video that said ..'we love you, you're special. Come home."
  • don't expect dozens of Republicans to vote for impeachment, but these alternatives aren't coming to the floor in a Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives.
  • Yes, moderate Republicans are calling for censuring the President. Pelosi made it clear on the Democratic caucus call Monday that censure wasn't on the table. The majority of her caucus is backing impeachment.
  • At this point there are two votes coming to the House floor where Republicans can register their anger with Trump's actions. They can vote for Raskin's bill on the 25th Amendment or they can vote for impeachment. That's it. Democrats don't want to give them an out card or another option.
  • Right now, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to use a rarely used procedural move to get McConnell to bring back the Senate with him and force a trial. The move only requires McConnell and Schumer to be on the same page, but the expectation as of now is McConnell isn't going to agree with it.
  • As the House charges ahead, there is a growing realization in the Senate, that an impeachment trial of Trump cannot be put off for 100 days. Instead, the plan that is beginning to make the most sense is one in which the new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would divide each day in half. In the morning, the Senate would move ahead with confirming Biden's Cabinet and begin work on his stimulus package. In the afternoon, the Senate would reconvene as a court room where former President Donald Trump is on trial. Biden alluded to this Monday noting that it was his "hope and expectation."
  • Alan Frumin, the former Senate parliamentarian, Monday night who told CNN that he didn't believe there was anything precluding Schumer from dividing the day like that, essentially allowing the Senate to double track. In essence, only having a few hours in the morning could delay Biden's agenda.
  • Senate rules simply say that once the trial starts at 12 p.m. ET every day the Senate should be in trial, but "the adjournment of the Senate sitting in said trial shall not operate as an adjournment of the Senate, but on such adjournment, the Senate shall resume the consideration of its legislative and executive business."
  • At first, members thought they could potentially dispose of the articles quickly if they came to the Senate, but while there are no rules governing how long a trial has to be, members also don't want to make a sham out of the process. Essentially, if the Senate Democrats have to have a trial, if Pelosi is going to send them over, many members are arguing they need to do it right. That means expect this trial to last days, not hours.
aidenborst

Impeachment poll: A historic percentage of Americans want Trump removed - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The potential removal of President Donald Trump from office starts out more popular than any other removal process of a president in recent American history. Removing Trump from office remains quite unpopular among Republicans, however.
  • You can see that well in an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday. The majority (56%) say Trump should be removed from office, while just 43% believe he should not be removed.
  • An average across polls since Wednesday (in which no pollster is counted more than once) shows that 50% of Americans want Trump to either be impeached, for the 25th Amendment to be invoked or for Trump to resign from office. The minority (43%) say that none of these should occur.
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  • When Democrats began an impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019, removing him from office wasn't anywhere near as popular. Before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that inquiry, only about 40% of Americans were for impeaching and removing Trump. About half the electorate was against it.
  • The fact that so many Americans want Trump out of office is, indeed, historically unprecedented this early in the process.
  • The percentage of Americans who wanted Bill Clinton impeached after his affair with Monica Lewinsky never climbed higher than 40%. Likewise, the percentage of Americans who thought Richard Nixon should be removed or should resign from office was at about 40% when the House voted to formally start an impeachment inquiry in February 1974.
  • In order for Trump to be found guilty by the Senate this time around, at least 34% of Senate Republicans would have to vote yes.
  • Support among Republicans stood at just 13% in the ABC News/Ipsos poll. And an average of all polls since Wednesday puts that percentage at about 15%. About 10% to 15% of Republicans were in favor of impeaching and/or removing Trump during the last Trump impeachment proceedings. What happens to these percentages in the coming weeks is very much up in the air. Biden's going to be president in less than two weeks. He will be president and Trump will likely be gone from office by the time the Senate votes on any impeachment issues regarding Trump.
  • What is clear cut is that Americans are very unhappy with Trump after the events and aftermath of Wednesday. The mere idea of removing a president from office is a big step. A lot of Americans look ready to take it again.
  • The potential removal of President Donald Trump from office starts out more popular than any other removal process of a president in recent American history. Removing Trump from office remains quite unpopular among Republicans, however.
Javier E

Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt
  • You can imagine why this would be. Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.
  • Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the 21st.
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  • an important constitutional amendment seems, to the men and women who are empowered to use it, too controversial to actually use.
  • The result: institutional and administrative chaos; our military chain of command is compromised; people around the elected president feel compelled to act above the law and remove papers from his desk. The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed because, in some ways, it is
ritschelsa

House Democrats to consider impeachment, 25th Amendment measures - 0 views

  • impeachment against President Donald Trump on Monday for "incitement of insurrection" when his supporters violently breached the Capitol last Wednesday.
    • ritschelsa
       
      It's important to impeach him now so that Trump can not run for office again
  • "We are calling on the Vice President to respond within 24 hours," Pelosi said in her letter, which said that Democrats would pursue impeachment legislation next.
  • The measure says that Trump has "demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law."
    • ritschelsa
       
      What he promoted was domestic terrorism, a threat to national security indeed
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  • "to expel members to voted to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist coup that has left people dead. They have violated the 14th Amendment,"
  • House impeaches Trump this week, the earliest the Senate could begin to take it up would be January 19
    • ritschelsa
       
      He may not have long in office, regardless of impeachment, it is still vital to impeach him in order to regain faith in our democracy
hannahcarter11

Cori Bush Condemns Republicans Who Skirted Metal Detectors At U.S. Capitol | HuffPost - 0 views

  • Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) lambasted her Republican colleagues who refused to follow new safety rules at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, saying lawmakers who refused to use new metal detectors to do their work in Congress should get another job.
  • Many House Republicans refused to use the metal detectors on Tuesday evening when they entered the chamber to vote on a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to strip President Donald Trump of his powers
  • “The speaker and her Democratic colleagues think an appropriate response is to prevent members from exercising their Second Amendment constitutional rights in the very place that wasn’t secure a week ago,” Steube said on the House floor. “This attack didn’t come from the inside; it came from the outside. And to respond by restricting members’ Second Amendment rights … is appalling.”
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  • Bush said Tuesday night that her Republican colleagues were simply trying to “push the limits as far as they can.”
  • “If they won’t abide by the simple things this job calls for, then go find another one.”
Javier E

A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly - The New York Times - 0 views

  • it’s basically madness all the way to the top: bad policy, bad strategy, bad politics, bad legal maneuvering, bad optics, a self-defeating venture carried out via deranged-as-usual tweets and public insults.
  • Imagine, if you will, that George W. Bush had started acting like Donald Trump partway into his second term …. Is there any question that people would be talking about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him? Not for political reasons, but because it would be obvious that some tragic mental impairment had befallen the commander in chief.
  • Trump hasn’t had a stroke or suffered a neurological disaster, and his behavior in the White House is no different from the behavior he manifested consistently while winning enough votes to take the presidency.
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  • the only possible explanation for such a quick succession of stunning lapses in judgment would be a severe stroke, an aggressive brain tumor or some other neurological disaster that had rendered him unfit to continue in office, at least until it could be treated. I don’t even think this would be controversial
  • But he is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. Pointing this out is wearying and repetitive, but still it must be pointed out.
  • This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.
katherineharron

What is impeachment? Here's what you need to know - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The overall impeachment process laid out in the Constitution is relatively simple: President commits "high Crime or Misdemeanor," House votes to impeach, Senate conducts a trial.
  • The one President Donald Trump faces now, after inciting a riotous mob to attack the Capitol, is unprecedented in all sorts of ways, which means the process will feel entirely new and different from the one we saw in late 2019 around the Ukraine investigation.
  • Specifically, this House impeachment vote is likely to be done Wednesday,
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  • this second impeachment of Trump, in which a US President is accused for the first time of inciting violence against another branch of government.
  • In that first effort, the details of Trump's pressure on Ukraine leaked out over the course of weeks and built into Democratic support to launch and conduct an investigation and, ultimately, to impeach him.With Trump's time in office set to expire at noon on January 20, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also gave Trump and Vice President Mike Pence the option of avoiding impeachment if either Trump resigned or Pence mobilized the Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.When those two offramps were ignored, Democrats in the House moved quickly toward impeachment and the first post-presidential impeachment trial in US history.
  • The Article argues that Trump incited his supporters by repeatedly denying the election results in the lead-up to the counting of the electoral votes, that he pressured Georgia's secretary of state to "find" additional votes for him, and in doing so he "gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government," "threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government."
  • Getting from Trump's misdeed to impeachment proceedings in the House took 86 days in 2019. It's going to take just a week in 2021.
  • This time, while there's an argument he committed treason, Democrats in the House have alleged Trump "engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States."
  • It took 48 days to get from Trump's December 19, 2019 impeachment to his February 5, 2020 acquittal. That process was slowed by a break over the holidays. The trial actually began January 16.
  • This time it could be slowed by the fact that Trump won't be in office any more by the time the trial starts and new President Joe Biden will be asking the Senate to vote on his Cabinet nominees and act on legislation to address the Covid pandemic as well as relief for Americans hurt by the troubled economy.
  • This time, incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is hoping to pursue a half-day schedule to conduct the trial part of the day and business the rest of the day.
  • When both of the new Democratic senators from Georgia are seated, it will take 17 Republicans voting with Democrats to reach a two-thirds majority and convict Trump.
  • The most unconventional aspect of this second impeachment effort is that Trump will be a former President by the time it concludes. There is precedent for former officials facing impeachment both in US history and in England, from whence the Founders imported the idea of impeachment. Read here about what's technically called a "late impeachment" from the scholars Frank Bowman and Brian Kalt.
  • Beyond the stain of being a President who a majority of Congress feels it's worth impeaching for a second time, conviction could mean he can't run for office again in 2024. Barring him from further office would require a second vote by senators, although it probably would not require two-thirds agreement. It could also cost him his more-than $200,000 per year pension if the Senate wants to take that way.
  • Trump is widely thought to be considering the never-before-attempted self-pardon, to inoculate himself from future legal jeopardy related to his time in office and running for office. What's not clear is whether a late impeachment would have any bearing on his power to pardon himself. As the impeachment scholars Kalt and Bowman point out, the text of the Constitution doesn't mention pardons in terms of impeachment. It certainly seems like a successful impeachment would come up if and when a potential self pardon is challenged in court.
mariedhorne

Capitol Riot Becomes Civics Lessons in Schools - WSJ - 0 views

  • Mr. Ridenour, a social sciences and civics teacher at Dupo High School in southern Illinois, one of 40 states that require civics class for graduation, was used to having tough conversations with his civics students whose political views span both sides of the aisle, with more of them leaning to the right.
  • In a vigorous, civil debate, the teens looked up the definition to incite and discussed the constitutional right to protest and the 25th amendment.
  • he federal government annually spends about $3 million on civics education, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Council for the Social Studies.
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  • Only 24% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level in the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exam, largely unchanged since 1998. Proficiency means students should be able to recognize differences between American ideals and reality, understand the separation of powers and be able to explain how citizens influence government.
  • Linda Menk, a school board member for the Coweta County School System outside Atlanta, attended the rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, prompting a petition to call for her removal with more than 1,000 signatures.
  • “In all fairness I don’t believe that’s true,” said Dean Jackson, spokesman for the Coweta County School System, in response to Ms. Cesari’s description of the curriculum.
martinelligi

House To Take Up Impeachment Over Trump's Role In Capitol Mob : Congress Weighs Action ... - 0 views

  • On Monday, House Democrats filed an impeachment resolution charging Trump with inciting an insurrection. A vote is expected this week, likely on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the House is also moving forward with a resolution calling on Vice President Pence to invoke the Constitution's 25th Amendment, relieving Trump of his duties until his term ends next week.
  • House Democrats' article of impeachment cites both Trump's incitement of his supporters on Wednesday and his call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump encouraged the official to "find" enough votes to overturn the election in the state.
  • Given the timeline and required action from the Senate, removing Trump from office before Jan. 20 is unlikely — if not impossible. However, Schumer is looking into using emergency authority that would let him and Republican leader Mitch McConnell call the Senate back early for a trial, a senior Democratic aide says.
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  • the narrowly divided chamber could also seek to bar him from holding office in the future.
  • Asked if Trump engaged in sedition, Biden replied: "I've been clear that President Trump should not be in office. Period."
  • Trump's actions prompted immediate calls for his removal from both political opponents and some Republicans once considered allies. But even those who criticize Trump are not in agreement over whether impeachment is the best approach.
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