President Trump Is Impeached Again

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to impeach President Trump—one week after a mob of his supporters violently stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol and one week before President-elect Joe Biden is set to be sworn into office.

Lawmakers charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S. government by sowing false claims about election fraud and encouraging his supporters to try to stop the U.S. Senate and the House from certifying Biden’s victory. After leaving a speech that Trump gave to supporters in front of the White House last Wednesday, the rioters made their way to the Capitol, broke through police barricades, and swarmed the building, ransacking the seat of American government. One Capitol Police officer was killed and dozens of other officers were injured. Lawmakers who were in their chambers and in the process of certifying the election results were forced to evacuate and take shelter.

“We are debating this historic measure at an actual crime scene, and we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the president of the United States,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said as he opened the impeachment debate on Wednesday. “This was not a protest. This was a well-organized insurrection against our country that was organized by Donald Trump.”

President Trump has denied doing anything wrong. He told reporters on Tuesday that his actions ahead of the riot at the Capitol were “totally appropriate.”

Trump is the first president in American history to be impeached twice. The House also impeached him in December 2019, accusing him of pressuring a foreign government to help him win the 2020 presidential election. But no House Republicans supported it, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a mostly party-line vote, and he remained in office. 

On Wednesday, the House voted 232-197 in favor of impeaching the president for insurrection, arguing that he must be held accountable for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” as the impeachment article states. All 222 Democrats in the House voted for impeachment. This time, 10 Republicans crossed party lines and voted to impeach Trump.

"The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the third ranking member of her party in the House, said ahead of the impeachment vote. "There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

While lawmakers from both parties denounced the violence that occurred at the Capitol, 197 Republicans—93 percent of their party’s members in the House—voted against impeachment. (Four Republicans did not vote.) Many said voting to impeach the president would do no good because it would further divide the nation.

“I can think of nothing that would cause further division more than the path the majority has taken,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said during the impeachment debate. “Rather than looking ahead to a new administration, the majority is settling scores with the old one.”

The Constitution permits Congress to remove presidents before their term is up if they’re found to have committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment is the first step in that process.

The next step is a trial in the Senate. If at least two-thirds of the senators find the president guilty, he’s removed from office, and the vice president takes over as president. 

But Trump has only seven days left in the White House, and a Senate trial might not take place until after he leaves office. If the Senate voted to convict the former president, it would then take a simple majority of senators to vote to bar Trump from ever again holding federal office. (Experts disagree about whether the Senate would need to convict Trump in order to bar him from holding office again.)

The uncertainty about what will come next—and when—underscores just how unprecedented the situation is. No president has been impeached in the final days of his term, or with the prospect of a trial after he leaves office. 

Only two presidents other than Trump have ever been impeached—Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. They were both acquitted by the Senate and remained in the White House for the remainder of their terms. President Richard M. Nixon also faced impeachment, in 1974, over his role in the Watergate cover-up. But once it became clear that there was enough support in Congress to remove him from office, he resigned.

In 2019, Trump was impeached for the first time, after he was accused of trying to solicit Ukraine’s help in his reelection bid by pressuring its president to open a corruption investigation into Biden and his son, Hunter. But only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with his party and voted to convict the president of abuse of power. And the vote count fell well short of the 67 needed—two-thirds of the senators—to remove Trump from office. Several Republican senators have already indicated they might vote to convict President Trump this time around.

Regardless of what happens next, Biden is set to be sworn in as president on January 20. With continuing threats online from right-wing extremists, federal law enforcement authorities are increasing efforts to fortify the Capitol ahead of the inauguration and are planning to deploy up to 15,000 National Guard troops to the National Mall. State governments around the nation, also facing threats of violence over false claims of election fraud, have moved to beef up security for their elected officials as well. 

In the meantime, a massive investigation is underway to bring to justice the rioters who breached the Capitol. Dozens of people have already been charged with crimes, and federal authorities said that number is expected to rise into the hundreds, with prosecutors looking at charging some rioters with sedition and conspiracy. On Wednesday, as the impeachment debate was underway, President Trump released a statement deploring violence and lawlessness and calling on Americans to “ease tensions and calm tempers.”

At his inauguration, Biden plans to call for a divided nation to come together at a time of political crisis and a deadly pandemic. As the nation awaits the Senate trial, some experts see the debates in Congress as a further sign that the rioters who stormed the Capitol last Wednesday weren’t able to stop our democracy from functioning, just as they weren’t able to stop the certification of the November election, which lawmakers completed hours after the police had cleared rioters from Capitol. 

“If what we saw last week is a mob,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, “what we see this week is a process by which we collectively make a decision as a country through our representatives about what, if anything, we should do to hold someone accountable for the actions that may have precipitated it.”

With reporting by The New York Times.