The Senate’s Impeachment Power to Disqualify Trump from Future Federal Office Is What Makes This Trial Constitutional

Keep a-knockin’ but ya can’t come in. Donald Trump’s Christine moment.

Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers and his Republican enablers in the Senate have put forward the bogus argument that an impeachment trial of a former President is unconstitutional.

They contend that, under the Constitution, the only penalty for an impeachment conviction in such a trial is removal from office — and that, since a former President cannot be removed, a trial is moot.

The House impeachment managers have been aided in their own argument by a recent letter signed by more than 170 Constitutional law scholars in which the scholars point out that, in fact:

1) The Constitution empowers the Senate to assess not one but two penalties upon a vote of conviction:

(a) Removal from office — for a sitting officer, automatic upon conviction

(b) Disqualification from future federal office — on a follow-up simple majority vote

But…

2) The Constitution does not require that a conviction entail a removal.

Thus…

3) Although the Senate can hold a vote to disqualify only following conviction, disqualification is not predicated on — or in any way tethered to — removal. Rather…

Disqualification stands as a separate, independent impeachment power.

Here’s a point that’s easy to miss, though — it’s not mentioned in the scholars’ letter, and I don’t know if the House managers raised it:

Even if Trump was the sitting President right now, he would become the former President at the moment of conviction.

So, at the moment of any subsequent vote to disqualify — and such a vote can take place only following a vote to convict — he would be the former President.

It would be the same for any federal officer in this situation. It is a logical necessity of the Senate protocol in which disqualification is to be considered and voted on separately from the impeachment article itself.

As soon as one acknowledges that the Senate’s power to disqualify is a separate, independent impeachment power to be deliberated and voted upon separately following conviction, then any legal, Constitutional objection to an impeachment trial for a former President disintegrates.