With less than a year before the presidential elections and his chance for serving a second term, current United States President Donald Trump has become the third president in American history to be impeached. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18, 2019, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Though protests for impeachment have been heavily present from many left-leaning citizens, it was the whistleblower complaint regarding Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selensky, which the White House had attempted to cover up, that initiated the official impeachment process. The whistleblower’s comment, which was declassified Sept. 26, 2019, stated, “In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
The anonymous whistleblower accuses the president of the United States of pushing the foreign leader to investigate his potential 2020 political opponent, Joe Biden. Trump is also accused of withholding 400 million dollars of taxpayer money from Ukraine as a bargaining chip to achieve his political agenda. This exploiting of the unique privileges of the U.S. president is what resulted in Trump being impeached on the basis of abuse of power.
The basis for obstruction of Congress came from the evidence that Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry of his actions involving Ukraine by deterring key witnesses from testifying, burying condemning documents, and harassing the witnesses that did testify via Twitter to his 66 million followers. For instance, Trump tweeted assailing the former United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom he had removed previously in the year, during Yovanovitch’s testimony in the impeachment inquiry regarding how she felt threatened by Trump. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors,” Trump wrote on Nov. 15, 2019.
Though Trump has been impeached, he remains the president, as he must be tried by the republican-dominated Senate, with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, presiding to decide whether Trump will be removed from office. The U.S. Constitution states that the Senate has the “sole power” to remove impeached officials if they are found guilty of high crimes, so, despite the House’s impeachment, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, could simply refuse to hold a trial. However, the Republican leader stated, “Under the impeachment rules of the Senate, we’ll take the matter up. The chief justice will be in the chair. We intend to do our constitutional responsibility,” meaning the Republican Senators wish to try Trump and potentially have him removed from office. While Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were both impeached, neither was convicted by the Senate. In the case of Trump, it would take 20 Republicans voting with Democrats for the Senate to reach the two-thirds vote required to remove Trump from office.
Trump’s impeachment trial began on Jan. 16, 2020. Fighting against the impeachment charges, Trumps’ lawyers, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow, filed a brief on Jan. 20, 2020 claiming the charges are fabricated. The brief states, “The Articles of Impeachment now before the Senate are an affront to the Constitution and to our democratic institutions. The Articles themselves—and the rigged process that brought them here—are a brazenly political act by House Democrats that must be rejected.” The trial is currently ongoing, likely to overlap with the early stages of the Democratic caucus/primary season, starting with the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3.