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All Your Paranoid Impeachment Questions, Answered. Again.
What you need to know about the unprecedented second trial of Donald J. Trump
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump presents a series of unusual constitutional questions. There is little argument about the facts of the case: Donald Trump repeatedly tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then, on January 6, 2021, egged on a crowd that would later storm the Capitol, terrorize lawmakers, damage historic property, and kill a policeman. Instead, the debate and Trump’s likely defense have pivoted on questions of law. Can a federal official be impeached after leaving office? And were Trump’s actions an impeachable offense? These are the questions that Republican defenders of the president hope will drive the impeachment trial scheduled to begin on February 9, as Democrats lay out the case against Trump’s actions.
So can Trump be impeached after leaving office?
Yes. The preponderance of scholarly opinion is that late impeachment, the technical term for impeaching someone who is no longer in office, is constitutional. As Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State who has studied this, points out, “While the text may be ambiguous, the history is clear” that late impeachment is allowed, in light of contemporary practice at the timing of the Constitution’s framing.
Has anyone ever been impeached after leaving office?
Two federal officials have been subjected to a Senate impeachment trial after leaving office. The first was William Blount, a senator from Tennessee who in 1797 faced charges of conspiring with the British to invade Spanish Florida. While Blount’s trial is often used to point to a different precedent — that members of Congress are not subject to impeachment — Blount’s lawyers conceded in his defense that impeachment after leaving office was possible. However, they argued, in his case, the remedy of impeachment would not apply because he had already been expelled from the Senate for his actions.
More recently, William Belknap, Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, was impeached only hours after resigning from office in 1876. Belknap was illegally charging…
