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This will take some days or even weeks for the group of House lawmakers who will make the case against Trump and his lawyers to answer. So a trial can't practically happen until after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will not bring senators back until the last day of Trump's term -- January 19 -- at the earliest.

Senators take an oath before the proceedings. There's a call to order each day. The Chief Justice has specific duties. There are set time limits for arguments and rebuttals and all questions from senators for the House and Trump attorneys must be submitted in writing and read by the Chief Justice.

What's the historical precedent?There have been three previous presidential impeachments, including Trump's first. President Andrew Johnson was impeached, but survived the Senate trial by one vote after seven Republicans broke ranks with their party. Johnson did not win election after his impeachment. President Bill Clinton was impeached in his second term and was easily acquited; less than a majority of senators supported removing him from office, far from the 2/3 required.

They will be busy with confirmation hearings for Biden's Cabinet nominees -- at least four are already scheduled for the week of January 20, for Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary nominee Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen and Secretary of Homeland Security nominee Alejandro Mayorkas. Senators could be called on to draft legislation having to do with the pandemic or economic relief -- Biden wants to increase relief checks to $2,000.

Impeachment failed the first time against Trump. What's different now?In a word, Republicans. In the first Trump impeachment trial, only one Republican senator -- Mitt Romney of Utah -- voted to remove him from office. This time, McConnell, rather than protecting Trump, is said to be happy about the effort as a way to excise Trump or purge him from the GOP.

How many votes are required to convict Trump?Great question! Conviction requires 2/3 of those present. If all 100 senators are present, that's 67 senators. Assuming those two Georgians are seated, that means there are 50 senators from each party and 17 Republicans would be required.

If those two Democrats from Georgia are not yet seated, it might require 66 senators. If some number of Republicans didn't want to vote against Trump but also didn't want to vote to convict, they could skip the vote and change the ratio. That kind of thing has been known to happen, although not during impeachment proceedings.

There is precedent for impeaching former officials. Read about that -- it's called a "late impeachment" -- here. While the main penalty for a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial is removal from office, senators could vote to bar Trump from holding office in the future -- remember, he has not ruled out running for president in 2024. He could also lose his six-figure pension and other post-presidential perks.

President Donald Trump has been impeached again -- the first leader in US history to be impeached twice by the House.

The House introduces and passes the articles of impeachment, but the Senate is where the person being impeached faces a trial -- and potential punishment.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he will not bring senators back until the last day of Trump's term -- January 19 -- at the earliest.

This will take some days or even weeks for the group of House lawmakers who will make the case against Trump and his lawyers to answer. So a trial can't practically happen until after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

While the main penalty for a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial is removal from office, senators could vote to bar Trump from holding office in the future -- remember, he has not ruled out running for president in 2024. He could also lose his six-figure pension and other post-presidential perks.

While McConnell sets the schedule as Senate majority leader now, he'll lose that status as soon as the results of Georgia's January 5 Senate runoff elections are certified and the two new Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are seated. At that point, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer will become Senate majority leader and will have more control over the proceedings.

This time, McConnell, rather than protecting Trump, is said to be happy about the effort as a way to excise Trump or purge him from the GOP.

President Donald Trump has been impeached again -- the first leader in US history to be impeached twice by the House.

Aid in dying remains hotly debated in several countries and has been at the heart of several major court cases. Earlier this year, a German court overturned a ban on assisted suicide. In Portugal, lawmakers took a first step in February toward allowing euthanasia, but the legislative change could still be vetoed by the country’s president.

Spain is a traditionally Catholic country and the Church has strongly opposed the idea of decriminalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide.

Mr. Sánchez was voted into office in January at the helm of Spain’s first coalition government, and the euthanasia law was the first one presented by his left-wing administration as part of its bid to promote a more liberal agenda. Under a previous Socialist government, Spain also became in 2005 one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage.

The House vote requires only a simple majority of lawmakers to agree that the president has, in fact, committed high crimes and misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority.

The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Impeachment is one of the weightiest tools the Constitution gives Congress to hold government officials, including the president, accountable for misconduct and abuse of power.

The article cites Mr. Trump’s weekslong campaign to falsely discredit the results of the November election, and it quotes directly from the speech he gave on the day of the siege in which he told his supporters to go to the Capitol. “If you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The article, drafted by Representatives David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Ted Lieu of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jerrold Nadler of New York, charges Mr. Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” saying he is guilty of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”

While the House moved with remarkable speed to impeach Mr. Trump, the Senate trial to determine whether to remove him cannot begin until Jan. 19, his final full day in office.

The Senate could hold a trial for Mr. Trump even after he has left office, though there is no precedent for it. Only two presidents other than Mr. Trump have been impeached — Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — and both were ultimately acquitted and completed their terms in office.

Conviction in an impeachment trial would not automatically disqualify Mr. Trump from future public office. But if the Senate were to convict him, the Constitution allows a subsequent vote to bar an official from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”

There is no precedent, however, for disqualifying a president from future office, and the issue could end up before the Supreme Court.

Democrats who control the House can choose when to send their article of impeachment to the Senate, at which point that chamber would have to immediately move to begin the trial. But because the Senate is not scheduled to hold a regular session until Jan. 19, even if the House immediately transmitted the charge to the other side of the Capitol, an agreement between Senate Republican and Democratic leaders would be needed to take it up before then.

Once the Senate receives the impeachment charge, it must immediately take up the issue, as articles of impeachment carry the highest privilege.

Democrats have argued that Mr. Trump’s offense — using his power as the nation’s leader and commander in chief to incite an insurrection against the legislative branch — is so grave that it must be addressed, even with just a few days remaining in his term.

With only a week left in his term, the House impeached President Trump, but he will leave office before he stands trial in the Senate. Here’s how the process works.

The charge against Trump is ‘incitement of insurrection.’

That vote would require only a simple majority of senators. Such a step could be an appealing prospect not just to Democrats, but also to many Republicans who either have set their sights on the presidency themselves or are convinced that it is the only thing that will purge Mr. Trump from their party. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, is said to hold the latter view.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay

Beyond the personal tensions, there is, of course, institutional antagonism. For some three decades, the N.L.D. was subject to crushing persecution at the hands of the Tatmadaw and the security forces; hundreds of the party’s members were arrested, tortured, killed or driven into exile.

At a minimum, the coup, being a major step backward, may undermine morale and cohesion among the troops. Decades of armed conflict with several ethnic groups have inflicted numerous casualties on ordinary soldiers. Desertion has been on the rise. Can the generals expect full compliance from the institution after the coup?

Both families were in Washington in November 1993 as part of their campaign

President Clinton spoke to the Haymakers and the Hattoris in the Oval Office. "We felt we were welcomed," Mieko and Masa said. "We believe he understood our position. He desired strong gun control laws."

That month, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, mandating background checks on gun buyers and a five-day waiting period on all purchases. President Clinton signed it into law just weeks after meeting the Hattoris and Haymakers.

Both Mieko and Masa remain involved in activism, nearly three decades after their son's killing. Most recently they spoke to students who survived the February 2018 Parkland shooting, and took part in the March for Our Lives in March 2018 to show support.

“For early Americans, Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence were verbal representations of what liberty was and what government should be—protecting people rather than oppressing them,”

The two most-cited clauses of Magna Carta for defenders of liberty and the rule of law are 39 and 40:

The Founding Fathers credited the 39th clause as the origin of the idea that no government can unjustly deprive any individual of “life, liberty or property” and that no legal action can be taken against any person without the “lawful judgement of his equals,” what would later become the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers.

That spirit is clearly present in the Declaration of Independence, which used Magna Carta as a model for free men petitioning a despotic government for their God-given rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Section 9 forbids the suspension of habeas corpus, which essentially means that no one can be held or imprisoned without legal cause.

But perhaps the greatest influence of Magna Carta on the Founding Fathers was their collective understanding that in drafting the U.S. Constitution they were attempting to create a Magna Carta for a new era.

“They knew exactly what they were doing,” says Kaminski. “They didn’t know if it would succeed or if it would last for centuries, but they were doing the best they could.” 

In central Italy, on the other hand, and especially in Florence, it was the clear contour that predominated, the closed and firmly circumscribed form, the static and plastic character.

The draftsmen of Venice and northern Italy preferred an open form with loose and interrupted delineation in order to achieve even in drawing the pictorial effect that corresponded to their painters’ imagination.

In drawing produced north of the Alps, the characteristic features lie in the tendency to pictorial compactness and precise execution of detail.

North of the Alps the autonomy of drawing was championed in the first instance by Albrecht Dürer, an indefatigable draftsman who mastered all techniques and exercised an enduring and widespread influence. The delineatory constituent clearly predominates even in his paintings. This corresponds to the general stylistic character of 16th-century German art, within which Matthias Grünewald, with his freer, broader, and therefore more pictorial style of drawing, and the painters of the Danube school, with their ornamentalizing and agitated stroke, represent significant exceptions.

Taylor said he was told that Trump would withhold the aid until the country’s leaders publicly announced investigations into Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and into unsubstantiated allegations of Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in the 2016 election

Where Sondland frequently said he couldn’t remember much of his work in Ukraine, Taylor recalled events with clarity.

By early afternoon, it was clear that Tuesday’s testimony was “turning out to be more important than some of us expected,”

“Trump is using the same approach he did to subvert the Mueller report: undermining the legitimacy of the messenger, assigning political motives to those who testify and relying on the Fox News firewall to serve up propaganda to his base,”

Earlier in the week Republicans attempted to censure Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, for his handling of the impeachment inquiry, only for the Democratic majority to set the resolution aside. On Thursday Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee and a Trump loyalist, introduced a resolution condemning the inquiry as an unfair, secretive and designed to embarrass the president.

Taylor, a respected Vietnam war veteran with half a century of public service, also described an “irregular, informal policy channel” by which the Trump administration was pursuing objectives in Ukraine “running contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy”

about 30 House Republicans barged into the secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and ordered pizza. The testimony of a Pentagon official was postponed by more than five hours. The members complained about lack of transparency as evidence is being given behind closed doors.

House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is a month old. Unlike Mueller it has moved at warp speed, subpoenaing witnesses, gathering testimony and building evidence against the president some say makes it inevitable he will be impeached by the House and put on trial by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Public opinion does not favour removing Trump from office, Ruddy argued, so the White House should avoid a politically costly battle.

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Chief strategist Steve Bannon is long gone. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham has never given a formal briefing to reporters in the west wing. Trump does not have a permanent chief of staff, only Mick Mulvaney in an acting capacity. Earlier this month Mulvaney held a disastrous briefing in which he blurted out a confession of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, only to issue a retraction later.

“We’re in a political payback system where everyone is trying to out up each other. If you look at the poll numbers, he’s actually holding up, although there’s a hardening of people who favour impeachment and removal. He’s not actually in a bad situation.”

Trump has openly encouraged Ukraine – and China – to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. With Taylor’s compelling evidence, it appears to be case closed. Some problems are unspinnable.

Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said the president’s exertion of pressure on the leader of Ukraine had been tantamount to blackmail and extortion.

It was such an abuse of power. I can’t think of a president who’s done anything more impeachable or worse than that. It’s indefensible and anyone who defends it is going to face some liabilities because it’s so egregious.”

He described the Republican fightback as “lawlessness, disorder and chaos. Undermining the process and smearing the witnesses and engaging in ‘whataboutism’ is the main strategy.

Republicans said little about the substance of the allegations.

Democrats are gearing up for televised hearings that could begin next month and feature dramatic and damaging testimony from the likes of former national security adviser John Bolton. Republicans are hamstrung by a torrent of revelations that makes today’s deniable rumour tomorrow’s smoking gun.

Trump retains two not so secret weapons to amplify his message: fiery rallies, which he is holding with greater frequency, and conservative media

More than half of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox said almost nothing could change their approval of Trump. For Republicans who get their news elsewhere, the figure is considerably lower.

the health-care industry’s strategy is to fill Americans with terror, convincing them that any major reform will cost them more, give them poorer care and make them more insecure. Even if the opposite is almost certainly true on all counts.

Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.

Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran.

The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart

Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent.

Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)

The divisions only continued during the 1790s, when newspapers began making reference to the progressive “left” and traditionalist “right” of the French assembly.

with the Bourbon Restoration and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy in 1814, liberal and conservative representatives once again took up their respective posts on the left and right of the legislative chamber.

“center left,” “center right,” “extreme left” and “extreme right.”

France’s “left” and “right” labels filtered out to the rest of the world during the 1800s, but they weren’t common in English-speaking countries until the early 20th century.

Democrats and Republicans traditionally sit on opposite sides of the House and Senate chambers.

Second choices, in this context, are as important as first.

Only Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg and Biden muster 15% so far. Klobuchar is worth keeping an eye on, as the next-door neighbor from Minnesota, but her support hasn’t swelled.

“Viability” is the watchword. That’s because the caucus rules dictate that a candidate must have 15% support from the attendees who show up for two hours in a school cafeteria on a typical winter evening draped in freezing rain.

Sixty perc ent of those polled said the former South Bend mayor is either their first or second choice, while 59% say the same about the senator from

Sanders benefits from a core of support that has stayed in place since he virtually tied Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus in 2016. His indictment: Clinton supported the Iraq war. His indictment revisited: Biden supported the Iraq war – a not-inconsiderable charge in Iowa. Iowa Democrats have a strong anti-war streak that runs deep among descendants of Prussian draft-dodgers.

I suspect on-the-ground organization matters most – especially for candidates who are tied up in a congressional impeachment trial and can’t campaign. For certain, caucus night is going to be crazy. No doubt about that.

Parnas told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday that the aim of the Ukraine effort was "all about 2020" and not about working in the interest of the United States. The revelation directly contradicts previous White House claims that overtures made by Trump and his allies to Ukraine were about rooting out corruption and not furthering his 2020 prospects.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has made a big production of advocating for witnesses at the Senate trial, wasn't that interested in the new information provided by Parnas.Speaking to CNN's Phil Mattingly, she threw cold water on the new Parnas evidence."I wonder why the House did not put that into the record and it's only now being revealed," she said.After it was pointed out the documents were only just turned over to the House, she said, "Well doesn't that suggest that the House did an incomplete job then?"

The Senate has drafted a document on decorum guidelines for the impeachment trial, including rules senators — who will be serving as jurors — must follow.

Not impressed by this impeachment or this President is former Rep. Chris Cannon, who is no longer in office and therefore a little more free to speak his mind. He was one of the Republican House managers during the Clinton impeachment.

Earlier this month a Taliban attack claimed the lives of two U.S. service members when a roadside bomb exploded as their vehicle passed.

The day had started as one of triumph for Mr. Biden and his party, with Democrats coming off elections the day before that sealed control of the Senate by picking up two seats in Georgia and Congress scheduled to clear away the last formal Republican objections to his victory by certifying the Electoral College outcome.

Filling out his cabinet, Mr. Biden chose Judge Merrick B. Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, to be attorney general, placing the task of repairing a beleaguered Justice Department in the hands of a centrist judge.

The assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators devolved into a physical confrontation that halted the process of certifying the Electoral College outcome

It’s not protest. It’s insurrection.

Other interest groups quickly seized on the Georgia results to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Biden to make good on his campaign promises.

“The work of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy, of decency, honor, respect, the rule of law,” he said, adding later: “We must step up

Mr. Biden’s advisers are deep into the process of developing policy proposals to deliver to Congress in the coming weeks, starting with another stimulus package

Shortly after, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter a one-minute video in which he empathized with the rioters because “we had an election that was stolen from us,” but then urged them to “go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”

The Democratic victories in Georgia put Mr. Biden’s party in control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and reduced the risk of total partisan gridlock in Congress, at least for two years.

“With Schumer in control of the calendar, he’s got the opportunity to do some really substantial things.”

The Biden team is also drafting proposals to implement the president-elect’s “Build Back Better” campaign agenda, including new government spending on clean energy, infrastructure, health care and education, financed by tax increases on the rich and corporations.

Mr. Biden’s allies in the Senate expressed optimism that, armed with committee chairmanships and control of the legislative calendar, they could advance the president-elect’s policy goals.

“We need to fix a lot of the damage Trump’s done, and then there’s pent-up demand for a whole lot of things — what do we do about climate and about racial inequality, about wealth inequality, about structural racism,” said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is set to be the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Mr. Biden has also proposed the most ambitious climate agenda of any president in history, including $2 trillion in spending on green initiatives. A majority in the Senate gives Mr. Biden options to make some of that happen.

But Mr. Biden’s agenda will be constrained by the Democrats’ narrow advantages in the House and in the Senate, where moderate Democrats such as Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will wield vast power over which plans can pass.

Before the outbreak of violence on Capitol Hill, Mr. Biden signaled on Wednesday morning that despite the shift of Senate control to Democrats, he would still attempt to build legislative coalitions with Republicans on his top priorities

A high-profile business lobbying group that has long supported many Republicans, the National Association of Manufacturers, denounced Mr. Trump on Wednesday for inciting the violence and suggested it was time for his administration to invoke a constitutional provision to remove him

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."

In a 2014 report, a bipartisan commission on election administration concluded that no one should have to wait longer than 30 minutes to vote, finding that wait times longer than that are “an indication that something is amiss and that corrective measures should be deployed.”

The S.P.A.E. found that 14 percent of Election Day voters waited more than 30 minutes to vote, an increase from 2016.

At the Interior Ministry, where she works, anger has mounted at what is seen as Mr. Cadène’s “laïcité of appeasement,” one that is more concerned with the “struggle against stigmatization of Muslims” than with upholding the Republic against “militant Islamists,” the weekly magazine Le Point reported.

Among the disadvantaged “are a majority of French Muslims, even if the situation is evolving,” Mr. Cadène said. The result, as he sees it, is discrimination that is religious and social: the inferior schools in ghettoized neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities mean Muslim children have fewer chances.

“As laïcité is a tool to allow us all to live together, whatever our condition, it’s also necessary that we be together,” he said. “That we live in the same places. That we interact. And this happens too rarely.” A lot of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces were very homogeneous, he noted. “This insufficient social mixing spurs fears because when you don’t know the other you are more afraid.”

Or it can be philosophical, a form of emancipation against religion, a battle for enlightenment against religious obscurantism, something close to atheism. Islam, with its vibrant appeal to young Muslims, then becomes the enemy

Hakim El Karoui, a Muslim business consultant and senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, said the problem is that laïcité has many meanings. It can represent the law of 1905, freedom of conscience and the neutrality of the state.

“It would be very dangerous to turn laïcité into a political tool,” he said. “It is not an ideology. It is absolutely not anti-religious. It should be a means to bring people together.”

Mr. Cadène’s views seem broadly aligned with Mr. Macron’s. While condemning the extremist Islamism behind recent terrorist attacks, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, the president has acknowledged failings. In an October speech he said France suffered from “its own form of separatism” in neglecting the marginalization of some Muslims.

Draft legislation this month seeks to combat radical Islamism through measures to curb the funding and teachings of extremist groups. It was a necessary step, Mr. Cadène said, but not enough. “We also need a law of repair, to try to ensure everyone has an equal chance.”

A law, in other words, that would help forge a France of greater mingling through better distributed social housing, more socially mixed schools, a more variegated workplace. The government is preparing a “national consultation on discrimination” in January, evidence of the urgency Mr. Macron accords this question in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.

In France, saying to someone, “Tell me your laïcité and I’ll tell you who you are,” is not a bad compass.

So, I asked Mr. Cadène about his. “It’s the equality before the state of everyone, whatever their conviction. It’s a public administration and public services that are impartial. And it’s fraternity because that is what allows us to work together in the respect of others’ convictions.”

He continued: “In theory it’s a wonderful model. But if the tool is not oiled it rusts and fails. And the problem today is that equality is not real, freedom is not real, and fraternity even less.”

or many decades the model made French citizens of millions of immigrants, and it remains for many French people of different backgrounds and beliefs and skin color, a noble idea, without which France would lose some essence of itself.

“I believe that our Republic is laïque’’ — secular — “and dedicated to social justice, and that laïcité can only survive on that basis.”