Does Congress have a legal basis to remove Trump from office?
Sorry about putting up another one of these threads. This is something I'm really curious and uninformed about because of how politicized all our news is nowadays.
As we all may know, the House convened to file articles of impeachment against Trump today. My question is, is there a legal basis to get Trump removed from office? Or is this just politicians using the impeachment process as a political weapon? My understanding is that the President must have broken a law in order to be impeached and removed. In this case, what law did Trump break, and what is the reasoning that supports this?
I'm obviously not a legal expert so I would appreciate if some of you could shed more light on this.
Impeachment is not a legal issue. It is a political process and the only one that Congress can pursue. They do not have the power to invoke the 25th amendment nor do they have the power to prosecute a sitting POTUS.
Ok, but the House would only impeach him if they believed he committed a crime right? I guess I should have asked if there is a legal basis to remove Trump from office, not just impeach him.
The only path is impeachment. If he is impeached in the house, to remove him, the senate would have to convict him on the charges
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1867/01/the-causes-for-whi…
Bump
The impeachment process is only a political process. Technically, one can impeach a President for anything at all. Generally, the understanding has been that an actual crime needs to be committed, or some other actual danger to the republic, for that charge to stick or be brought to a vote, let alone pass with a majority, but as we saw a year ago, that kind of reasoning doesn't really apply in the face of partisanship.
If we're talking specifics, then Mr Trump has explicitly committed several crimes over the last four years, and implicitly more, but even were he to proverbially shoot a man on the street, that would neither increase nor decrease the "legitimacy" of an impeachment proceeding. Nor, I suspect, would it make the politicians who have hitched their wagons to his any more likely to condemn him. So the fact that Mr Trump just attempted a putsch to overthrow the United States government doesn't make this (potential) impeachment proceeding any more or less a piece of politics than the one in which Mr Clinton was impeached for having an affair.
It's been some moons since I thought about the Clinton impeachment, but wasn't he impeached for perjury/obstruction? I don't think he was impeached for the affair (lord knows he wasn't the first or probably last to do that in office!).
You are correct! My memory was also clouded. He was investigated for the affair and impeached for perjury. And rightly so.
No. He is within his rights to challenge/contest the election and to continue to do so. While he did not tell his supporters to lower their emotions on the 6th, he did not call any action for violence. MSM pushing this false narrative
Exactly. MSM can make a guilty man innocent and an innocent man guilty.
The issue is not nearly as simple as you think it is but feel free to believe what you want.
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