Less than two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, Americans are already calling on Congress to impeach him.
Trump, infamously and historically, was impeached not once, but twice during his first presidential term — once for his blatant attempts to extort Ukraine into giving him dirt on his political opponent Joe Biden, and again for his role in inciting the deadly, violent attack against the US Capitol when he lost the 2020 presidential election to that very same opponent.
Both times, Trump was formally impeached in the US House of Representatives, but the US Senate failed to reach the number of votes required to officially remove him from office.
With just days of his second term under his belt and already more controversy and scandal than we can keep up with, Americans are beginning to wonder if a third impeachment is even possible.
It is.
The United States Constitution dictates that the House of Representatives can only file articles of impeachment against the sitting US president, vice president, and other federal officials for treason, bribery, and “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Given that Donald Trump is now currently the sitting US president, the House would only need to adopt the articles of impeachment by a simple majority vote, and the impeachment would be official.
The Constitution does NOT lay out a limit to the number of times that a federal government official or a sitting US president can be impeached.
While the impeachment process is rather simple and straightforward in the House of Representatives, it’s simply not enough to remove Donald Trump from the White House.
The Constitution dictates a two-part process for impeachment. The first being the majority vote in the House. One articles of impeachment have cleared the House of Representatives, the power of a conviction lies with the US Senate.
Only the Senate has the power to convict and remove a sitting US president from office, following a trial. Things become a bit more complicated in this stage of the process, as a conviction requires a two-thirds majority vote, as opposed to a simple majority in the House. If that two-thirds vote is achieved following the trial, that individual will be removed from government office.
No US president, in the history of this nation, has ever been forced out of the White House through an impeachment and subsequent conviction. Historically, President Richard Nixon is known as the POTUS who came the closest when he was embroiled in the Watergate Scandal. However, Nixon infamously resigned from the presidency in 1974, as the US House was prepared to cast its vote on articles of impeachment against him.
If Donald Trump ever were to be once again impeached by the House and ultimately convicted by the Senate and forced out of office, senators could choose to take things a step further still by holding a vote to disqualify him from ever holding an elected US office again.
Featured image via DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos