This has fired up the unhinged #Resistance and #NeverTrumpers
67 votes in the Senate could remove President Trump from office. But it would take 2nd, simple-majority vote based on a lesser-known clause of the Constitution to stop him from running again, @Hillhulse writes. https://t.co/YNVf796dKi
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 27, 2019
Hey, if you can’t beat him at the ballot box under the established rules, right?
(NY Times) With chances rapidly increasing that President Trump will be impeached by the House and tried in the Senate, an intriguing question has reared its head: Could he be ousted only to try to return to the White House in 2020 in a Trumpian bid for redemption and revenge?
Like so much of the coming impeachment showdown, that decision rests entirely with the Senate. The Constitution famously grants senators the sole power to convict and remove a president — something that has never been done. What is seldom discussed is a more obscure clause of the Constitution that allows the Senate discretion to take a second, even more punitive step, to disqualify the person it convicts from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.â€
Imposing that penalty would effectively bar the president from reclaiming his old job. In an added twist, tacking on the extra punishment requires only a majority vote in the Senate, not the two-thirds — or 67 senators — required to convict.
For now, the idea of disqualifying Mr. Trump is the remotest of hypotheticals, since it would first require the Senate to vote to impeach and remove him. That seems far-fetched, given how little appetite Republicans in the chamber have shown so far for deserting him, despite the flood of damaging revelations that have come forth in the impeachment inquiry. But if nearly two dozen Republicans did vote to impeach him, it would take only a simple majority to banish him from the presidency for life.
The first is not going to happen, so the second is a pipe dream. And that’s what these Trump haters have: pipe dreams. They just can’t control themselves in their virulent hatred. If Trump came out in favor of abortion, assault rifle confiscation, getting rid of fossil fuels, and the Green New Deal, they’d still find a way to oppose him.
“If the impeachment is based on the Ukraine phone call and activity around that, and the idea is that he is improperly using his office to get dirt on his opponent, the remedy to that is to remove him from office,†said Edward B. Foley, an election law authority and constitutional law professor at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. “If the fear is the incumbent can’t fight a fair fight, then disable the candidate’s ability to not wage a fair fight.â€
Politics is all about quid pro quo, about cajoling other politicians, nations, and people, using a stick or carrot. Move on, folks.
