‘Get this done in a week.’ Why some Democrats now want speedy Trump impeachment trial

Democratic senators are reportedly eyeing a week-long impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump, bracing for an acquittal that appears more and more likely after 45 Republicans voted for a measure to dismiss the trial as unconstitutional.

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, are crafting a resolution to censure Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that left five dead, including a Capitol police officer.

“We have to hold President Trump accountable, and then we also have to balance that with the public’s number one demand, which is COVID relief,” Kaine said, according to The Washington Post. He added that it could be possible to complete the trial in a week.

Censure is a formal statement of condemnation and doesn’t remove an official from office. The Senate censured former President Andrew Jackson in 1834, the only time the Senate has taken such action against a president.

The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump on Jan. 13 on the charge of “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the Capitol siege. Before the attack, Trump spoke outside the White House at what he billed a “Save America Rally,” where he continued his false claims that the election was stolen and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol.

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice. No president has ever been convicted in the Senate and doing so would require a two-thirds majority vote.

If all Democratic senators vote to convict, 17 Senate Republicans are still needed to convict Trump of impeachment.

All but five Republicans voted for an effort on Tuesday spearheaded by Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, who argued that it was unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a former president. Although the 55-45 vote dismissed Paul’s objection and cleared the way for the trial to continue as planned, it suggests that the Senate likely won’t have enough votes to convict Trump, leaving him acquitted for the second time.

The censure resolution would include elements of the 14th Amendment and declare that the Capitol attack was an attempt to stop Congress “undertaking its constitutional duty to count electoral votes,” Kaine said.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment reads: “No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

If Trump is found to have violated the amendment, he could be barred from seeking office again, according to Kaine.

But Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told The Washington Post he’s not sure Kaine’s resolution incorporating the 14th Amendment could actually keep Trump from again seeking office in the future.

“I worry about the cop-out of a condemnatory censure, which Senators shouldn’t be led to think gets them off the hook of having to convict the former president under the Article of Impeachment,” Tribe told the Post.

Collins said she supported censuring Trump “in lieu of” an impeachment trial.

“If the outcome of the trial is already obvious — which I believe yesterday’s vote shows clearly... then the question is, is there another way to express condemnation of the president’s activities with regard to the riot and the pressure that he put on state officials?” Collins said.

Other Democratic senators have expressed that Trump’s second impeachment trial could be speedier than the first.

“This is a pretty straightforward trial,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, according to Politico. “I never thought it needed to be as long as the Ukraine trial which was a very complicated charge with a lot of witnesses and important testimony. I would hope we could get this done in a week.”

“A lot of us were witnesses to what took place,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, The Washington Post reported. “There’s been enormous press coverage. If you don’t know what happened that day, you really haven’t been paying attention. So I think there is the prospect, at least, of quite a rapid trial.”

This story was originally published January 28, 2021 at 11:52 AM with the headline "‘Get this done in a week.’ Why some Democrats now want speedy Trump impeachment trial."