No president in U.S. history has ever been impeached twice. But that is likely to change this week. The House of Representatives is moving forward with plans to impeach President Trump. They plan to vote on impeachment if Vice President Pence doesn't first try by Wednesday to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment. And since that's an unlikely move from Pence, an impeachment vote Wednesday is more than likely.
lawmakers in the House would vote on an article of impeachment that House Democrats formally introduced against Trump on Monday. The article charges him with incitement of insurrection for his role in the takeover of the U.S. Capitol by a violent pro-Trump mob. Democrats say they have enough votes in the House to impeach the president for the second time in little more than a year. But why impeach a president who's on his way out? And if the House votes to impeach, what does that mean for the timing of the Senate trial? Can Trump be convicted after he leaves office? And where would that leave the future of the Republican Party?
This is Can He Do That, a podcast that explores the powers and limitations of the American presidency. I'm Alison Michaels. There is a lot going on on Capitol Hill and at the White House right now, so I turn to Jackie Alamany, a post reporter who covers the power centers in our country's government in her morning newsletter called Power Up. Jackie started by explaining what Democrats introduced in the House this week in response to the president's involvement in last week's riots at the Capitol. We saw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She sent out a letter to her colleagues on Sunday evening outlining the way that they would proceed this week. One, they would first introduce the Raskin resolution, which would basically be a resolution that members would vote on to formally call on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment along with the president's cabinet in order to remove the president from office. It's likely that resolution is going to pass. I'm pretty sure they're going to be voting on it.
in short order right now, Tuesday morning at 11 a.m. But however, it's highly unlikely that Mike Pence is actually going to move on that. So that's why the next step that Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlined was then proceeding with the article of impeachment, which was drafted by Congressman Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin and David Cicilline. And I just sort of love this historic vision as terrifying and surreal as it is. The three of them drafted this article on Wednesday when they were bunkered in David Cicilline's office together after they were asked to take cover and hide from the pro-Trump mob that had breached security on Capitol Hill. So before we get to the details of what's in that article of impeachment, I just want to touch on the 25th Amendment for a second.
Is it unlikely to go anywhere, as you said? So it's unlikely to go anywhere for a few reasons, but primarily as strained of a relationship as Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump have, it would be the ultimate betrayal that I don't think Pence would cross the line on. We've heard from those close to him and his top aides that... While it's been in the conversation amongst maybe some senior level staffers, it hasn't been something that Vice President Pence has been seriously considering, even though he is infuriated with this president and feels like the president has betrayed him, putting him in danger, jeopardizing his life and putting a target on his back via Twitter, especially on that Wednesday as the mob was attacking and storming the Capitol. The other factor here is that I think there's a lot of concern from at least the Trump staffers that I've spoken with that invoking something like the 25th Amendment would only.
fuel these conspiracy theories that a lot of Trump supporters hold right now and cause more chaos and tumult in the Republican Party, starting with his persistent claims of election fraud, which are unsubstantiated. And that was the first schism in the party. And by invoking the 25th Amendment, it further divides the Trump base and those who abide by a more fact-based reality. So then why did Democrats decide to pursue the 25th Amendment at all? Why did they decide to go this route instead of just going straight for impeachment?
Well, that would be the most expedient way to get this done, to get the president out of office to accomplish what they set out to do, which was to remove the president and prevent him from causing any more damage, because that process would ensure that Vice President Pence would be essentially the stand-in president for these remaining eight days until Joe Biden's inauguration. Impeachment, on the other hand, one, holds a bit more political liability for all parties involved, and it also is disruptive to Joe Biden's incoming administration and his agenda, and the timeline is not well-suited to the... timeline that Democrats are facing, which is that the Senate wouldn't be able to conduct their impeachment trial once this article of impeachment is voted on in the House and it's very likely to pass and then sent to the Senate because senators are on recess right now. So I want to talk to you more about the details of how that potential trial would play out. But before we even get there, let's talk about what's in this article of impeachment. They're impeaching him for incitement of insurrection. What does that mean? What's in here? So the incitement of insurrection charge that's outlined in this impeachment article is interesting in that.
It says that Trump willfully made statements that in context encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol, such as if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. That's a direct quote from Trump at the Stop the Steal rally that happened before the mob stormed Capitol Hill. So they're directly quoting the president. And I think, you know, last time around during the first impeachment trial in 2019, feels like a decade ago, there was a lot of criticism that there weren't actually real charges. And so I think this time around, this is much more tangible of a charge.
has the president's direct statements laying it out. That being said, some of the staffers that I spoke with on Capitol Hill yesterday did say that their bosses, the Republican bosses, at least the people who need to be persuaded to vote to convict the president on this impeachment article, that it needs to be more persuasive than it is right now. That something like hearing a top ally of the president, like his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, or his lawyer, Pat Cipollone, directly say that the president resisted calling the National Guard and that he took it. XYZ steps to prevent the necessary security that was needed to secure the Capitol and stop this breach and arrest the rioters. Something like that would add a little bit of beef to this article and potentially push some Republicans over the edge here. And back in 2019, one of the criticisms that Trump and a lot of his allies have made of the entire impeachment effort was that he wasn't being charged with crimes, as you say, real charges, right? That what they were suggesting he had done in Ukraine was not a crime and therefore he can't be impeached. Of course, that's not true because, you know, high crimes and misdemeanors is to be defined by Congress. But the idea that incitement of insurrection has a little bit more weight, might that carry something with Republicans who are considering whether or not Trump should be impeached?
We are seeing more Republicans than last time around actually actively deliberate over this. As someone noted to me, the conversation in 2019 was about, is Joe Manchin going to vote with Democrats or Republicans? And now the conversation has shifted to, OK, are Republicans going to get to 17, which would be the magic number in order to convict to remove Trump from office? And so far, you know, we've seen people like Senators Pat Toomey and Lisa Murkowski come out and call on the president to resign immediately. And in the House, that's a battle that's playing out, too. It doesn't necessarily matter as much because Democrats don't need Republicans in order to pass this article of impeachment. It's essentially a done deal.
But it's an interesting barometer of where the party is and what they're grappling with. You have members of leadership like Kevin McCarthy, who is essentially staying by his man, playing the role of... My Kevin, which was a title he affectionately earned early on in the administration. And he's sticking with that. He's sort of chided and condemned the president on private conference calls and selectively leaked that out to different reporters to make a little bit of a show of it. But a lot of Republicans are furious with Kevin McCarthy for leaving Mitch McConnell twisting in the wind here at the full-throated condemnation of the president that you're seeing from some other Republicans.
Uncle Bob can fix just about anything around the house, at least according to him. But when it comes to natural gas appliances, they should always be inspected by a qualified professional. Learn more at embergegas.com slash safety. The Democrats, back in 2019, they were making a set of political calculations about whether or not to impeach the president based on his potential reelection and various other factors. How are these political calculations different this time? What's at stake for the Democrats? There's less at stake for the Democrats, and that's why you're seeing someone like President-elect Joe Biden get behind the impeachment push, which I think surprised some people, because it's not just where the base is, but it's where...
the party is. And he's called for a bifurcated schedule in order to accommodate getting impeachment done while getting into office and getting his agenda off the ground running and proceeding with the confirmation process to get his nominees in their cabinet positions ASAP. That's pretty extraordinary. And the debate that existed in 2019 between Democrats has disappeared now. The political calculations are more omnipresent for Republicans, many of whom are up in 2022, and they've already lost all of their power in Washington, in Congress, in the White House. And they are...
already thinking about how they're going to get that back and voting to impeach the president and further alienate his supporters is not the way to do that. Many have calculated. I have spoken with some GOP strategists who feel like that is a miscalculation and that if you look at a place like those two Senate races in Georgia that we just saw Republicans lose, that appeasing the Trump base isn't going to necessarily work. There might not be crossover for some of these more moderate Republicans and that. at the end of the day, if Republicans continue to allow this kind of behavior from the president without taking any action, he's just going to take the party down completely. Now, I realize I've spent most of this conversation asking you about political calculations, but it's worth for a second just noting that there's politics and then, of course, there's human life and people died, people feared for their lives. To some degree, how much of this is an attempt to just hold the president accountable for some of the pain that he's caused?
Yeah, that is something that I haven't heard in my conversations with Republicans, at least. I do think there is sort of a moral calculus on the Democratic side here. This is the final breach for most people and for a select number of Republicans. But I haven't heard that much. I think the overwhelming feeling instead of that that I've heard is a fear that there's worse that's going to happen if they further inflame tensions, further alienate this president and his supporters. And taking these final actions to remove him from office might cause some more violence that the FBI and law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C. are already bracing for next week at Joe Biden's inauguration. So we touched on this, but I just wanted to.
address what an impeachment trial in the Senate could actually look like. So right now we're heading toward Wednesday, where we are likely to see a vote on impeachment in the House. At that point, is the Senate required to immediately take up the impeachment trial? So the problem right now is that the Senate isn't scheduled to come back into session until January 19th. So that would delay the impeachment trial until the start of the Biden administration, even though...
the article of impeachment would be sent over to the Senate immediately. It is possible that if 100 senators agreed to come back ASAP, that the trial could begin immediately, but that's unlikely to happen. And I think Republicans have calculated that the only thing that they have on their side right now is time. And so you're not going to see a big push on their part to come back in any way. Aside from that, there are still some constitutional questions because now that this trial would run over the president's term.
It would be a former President Trump who would be finishing out an impeachment trial. And there is some constitutional debate about whether or not a former president can even face impeachment. Right. But at this point, we expect if House does vote on impeachment, that we will see some sort of trial in the Senate. Yes. And we will see it sooner rather than later. There was initial talks of delaying this trial for the first 100 days of the Biden administration. But that directly contradicted the urgency that Democrats were expressing over getting Trump out of office. So you saw Senate.
Democrats, House Democrats as well, quickly recalibrate and decide to get this vote done as soon as possible so that the article of impeachment could be sent to the Senate ASAP. A few Republicans I spoke to yesterday said that Democrats, in their opinion, had made a big tactical error by even discussing delaying things because it undercut their arguments of urgency. Someone said to me, this was a quote that really struck with me, this Senate aide who had criticized Democrats for the timing of everything said that if we somehow voted on impeachment last Wednesday night, we could have gotten 80 votes, meaning that, you know, more than... 17 Republicans probably would have voted to convict Trump and then remove him from office. So this just presents the obvious question that a lot of people are asking. What is the point in bringing up a Senate impeachment trial if the president has already left office? Why do that? That's a really good question. And actually, Republicans have more of an incentive to have this trial go on than Democrats do, because if the president is convicted in an impeachment trial, then they can hold an additional vote to bar him from ever running for office ever again. And I think that is the ideal situation for a lot of Republicans who believe that the president has just destroyed and torn apart the party.
On the Democratic side of things, I do think it gets back to what you pointed out, which is this moral impetus that I think a lot of Democrats feel about what this president has done to society and the way he's eroded our constitutional norms and people's confidence in the electoral system. And a lot of the conspiracy theories that have now come into real world play. I covered Trump in 2016 and 2015 on the campaign trail and went to rally after rally for a year and a half straight. And the images that I saw last Wednesday really actually reminded me of a Trump rally that. just got completely out of hand. You know, violence and these open conspiracy theories just being screamed and shouted at each other was really the norm at these rallies. And seeing that then moved to a new environment and a new setting on Capitol Hill. And with a lot of these supporters just completely emboldened by the president who was fresh off of a speech during the Stop the Steal rally.
It was surreal, but it wasn't surprising. And I think that there is a feeling that in order to sort of correct course here, impeachment and sending a message and having that line in the history books that this president is the first president to ever have been impeached for the second time is really important to a lot of people to moving forward and I think finding closure in this chapter of American history. And are there any other consequences that the president could potentially face from Congress? The one other option that Republicans and some Democrats like Delegate Eleanor Holmes have. mentioned and proposed is censuring the president. And a bunch of Republicans that I spoke with yesterday wish that that's the route and the path that Congress was taking right now, because it would send that rhetorical message, that message for the history books, that, you know, formal condemnation of the president's actions and his rhetoric. Right. It seems more like a written warning of sorts than an actual consequence. So last question to you, as you look ahead to the rest of the week, to the next few weeks leading up to inauguration, what do you expect we're going to see in Congress? What happens next? The Rules Committee is meeting and they're going to get that article of impeachment through. Then they'll bring it to the floor tomorrow. And it's most likely to get pushed through, meaning...
Again, President Trump is going to be the first president in American history who will be impeached twice by the House. That will then get sent to the Senate immediately. And it's highly unlikely, but it would be possible that the Senate could take up that trial right away. But more than likely, we are going to be seeing a waiting game and the trial will not be taken up until January 19th, the day before Joe Biden's inauguration. The contours of whether or not Chuck Schumer can actually execute a bifurcated process here by having nominations in the morning and the impeachment trial at night is still up for debate.
And needless to say, I think the incoming Senate majority leader has a lot of planning and work to do from now until then. All right, Jackie, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Allison. This has been another episode of Can He Do That? Thanks so much for listening. Can He Do That? is a team effort here at The Post. It's produced by Arjun Singh with logo art from Loren Boglio and theme music by Ted Muldoon. Did you know you can play The Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in The Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required.