WASHINGTON – After a week of lawlessness displayed and incited by President Trump, Constitutional Accountability Center President Elizabeth Wydra issued the following reaction: 

The House needs to impeach President Trump. The Senate must remove him from power. And the Senate must disqualify him from holding federal office ever again.   

Just since Saturday, President Trump has committed two, separate removable offenses.   

Trump threatened a Georgia state election official to “find” thousands of non-existent votes and declare Trump the winner of Georgia’s electoral votes. Four days later, Trump incited a vicious, terroristic mob that invaded and wrecked the U.S. Capitol building, in a failed attempt to prevent the counting of electoral votes, which resulted in at least four deaths.  

These offenses are a dagger aimed at the heart of our Constitution. But we cannot ignore this truth: That dagger was handed to Trump by 52 Senate Republicans just one year ago. At that time, Senator Susan Collins defended giving Trump a pass by saying he had learned “a pretty big lesson” from impeachment and that he’d “be much more cautious in the future.”  

Toxic nonsense. Trump learned nothing except the power of impunity. We have watched that impunity devastate our nation’s Capitol building live on television, wrapped in the flags of the confederacy and “Trump 2020.”   

These ominous days, though they’re the final ones of Donald Trump’s presidency, demand that Senate Republicans pay the debt they owe to America for the ruinous mistake they made a year ago. They must put a stop to this. America cannot abide even another day of Trump in power. He must be removed from the White House and forbidden from ever again holding federal office.  

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Resources: 

First Magistrate in Foreign Pay (a discussion of the text and history of the impeachment clause), Elizabeth Wydra and Brianne Gorod, The New Republic, December 2019: https://newrepublic.com/article/155655/founding-fathers-impeachment-corruption-president-trump  

CAC’s Elizabeth Wydra on MSNBC Discusses Impeachment of President Trump, December 5, 2019: https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/tv-msnbc-cacs-elizabeth-wydra-on-msnbc-discusses-impeachment-of-president-trump/  

Can Congress Impeach Bill Clinton Again? (“Can a former president be impeached? Apparently, yes.”), Slate, February 12, 2001: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/02/can-congress-impeach-bill-clinton-again.html 

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Constitutional Accountability Center is a think tank, public interest law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of the Constitution’s text and history. Visit CAC’s website at www.theusconstitution.org.  

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