If the President Gets Impeached Can He Be President Again
Editor'due south note: This article was originally published on January. 15. On Tuesday, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives announced that President Donald Trump would confront two articles of impeachment (analogous to charges) in the Ukraine scandal. This sets upward a history-making vote on his impeachment in the coming days, followed by a trial in the Senate if the manufactures are canonical in the House. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
The original commodity, explaining how a president can be removed from part, is beneath.
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President Donald Trump is set to face up intense political opposition through the end of his term in 2021, having spent much of his iv years under the cloud of an investigation into his ties to Russian federation — which has resulted in the indictments or pleas of several close aides — and with Democrats leading the House of Representatives.
All the same, equally history shows, a sitting commander-in-chief resigning or beingness ousted early on is highly unlikely.
"The framers of the Constitution realized that you couldn't merely go rid of a president considering yous disagree with him. That would change our whole organisation of government," Larry Tribe, a professor of constitutional police force at Harvard Law School, tells PEOPLE.
"On the other paw," Tribe continues, "they didn't want to prepare upwards a system where there's no way to get rid of a president apart from waiting four years until the next ballot. They wanted to make the removal of a completely unfit and dangerous president possible just difficult."
In January, newly sworn-in Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib passionately vowed that incoming lawmakers were going to impeach President Trump (using some profanity during her voice communication), though pinnacle Democrats soon stressed that removing him was not their priority.
The president dismissed the possibility of impeachment on his Twitter with his characteristic confidence and bluster.
"How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nix wrong (no Bunco with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded)," he wrote on Jan. 4, farther claiming that he "had the well-nigh successful offset two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in political party history."
President Donald Trump
| Credit: Zach Gibson - Puddle/Getty
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Tribe, a longtime lawyer, warns confronting taking an extreme stance on either side of the impeachment question.
"I can't predict whether [impeachment] will happen, but I think that the people who predict either extreme are wrong," he says. "People who say it volition never happen are getting alee of their skis. And the people who say nosotros should impeach right now earlier hearings are really not only getting ahead of their skis but shooting themselves in the foot. Because trying to impeach him now before at that place is that kind of public resolve that he should be removed would exist nigh a guarantee that he would not exist removed."
Only two presidents have been impeached — Andrew Johnson, in 1868, and Pecker Clinton, in 1998 — and both were acquitted past the Senate.
In 1974, Richard Nixon became the simply president in U.Due south. history to resign, among the fallout from his coverup of the Watergate scandal, simply before he could be impeached by the House and tried in the Senate.
Here is a list of all the means a president can exit office, involuntarily or voluntarily, before their term is upward.
President Andrew Johnson
| Credit: The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty
Impeachment
Tribe explains that there is merely one style in which a sitting president can be removed past impeachment, and information technology'southward a multi-step process.
After reaching a majority vote in the House of Representatives to bring manufactures of impeachment confronting a president — analogous to criminal charges — two-thirds of the Senate so take to vote to convict, which has never happened. At Clinton'southward trial in the '90s, senators voted along party lines to conduct, 55-45.
"If the president is convicted, that is if they conclude that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, then he is automatically removed from office," says Tribe, who recently published To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment with co-writer Joshua Matz.
But this possibility isn't probable, Tribe says, unless "the nation comes to a very sweeping, bipartisan conclusion that the president has abused his power and is unfit for office. [That he is] too unsafe to remain as president."
Separately, if a sitting president were to exist charged and bedevilled of a crime outside of impeachment (a hypothetical whose legality is much debated), they would not automatically be kicked out of the White House.
"Theoretically, he [the president] could remain president and issue executive orders from his prison cell," Tribe says. "Just, of course, as a practical matter at that place'south no question that a president who was convicted of a law-breaking would be impeached and removed very promptly."
President Bill Clinton
| Credit: Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
The 25th Amendment
Tribe says that section iv of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution can temporarily "sideline" the president for iii weeks at a time, if invoked. But it'southward a very difficult process and has also never happened.
Essentially the pick exists "if the vice president and the majority of the cabinet members decide that the president [is unfit for] role, that he'southward got Alzheimer's or doesn't know what he's doing, doesn't take a clue what he's talking about," Tribe says.
"But it'southward not probable that the vice president and the bulk of the chiffonier would certify that," he continues. Put another fashion: Members of the president's own political party would have to be moved to act confronting him and the voters and outside of Congress.
In the unlikely event that this course of activity was taken, the president would step aside for three weeks and the vice president would human activity in his place. The House of Representatives and then the Senate would make up one's mind how to proceed.
Resignation
Rather than beingness kicked out, a president tin can also exit office early by resigning — rare but, unlike the above methods, not unimaginable.
"It depends very much on the particular president. Richard Nixon had a sense of shame, and so many of his colleagues could prevail on him to resign rather than be disgraced in a Senate impeachment trial," Tribe says.
In contrast Trump's voluntary exit "would occur simply if he sees it equally very much in his financial self-interest," Tribe believes. "Or, peradventure, in his involvement in protecting his son or daughter in going to prison house."
President Richard Nixon
| Credit: Hulton Annal/Getty
A former adviser to President George W. Bush argued something similar in an op-ed column published this calendar month, predicting that Trump would leave office in 2019 in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution.
Tribe says: "[President Trump] certainly isn't going to resign only because he'south tired of the office. Every bit long he's the president under existing policy, he feels safe from existence indicted and tried for a criminal offense."
Source: https://people.com/politics/how-presidents-can-be-removed-from-office/
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