Can Trump Lose Office?

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

These are not good times for President Donald Trump, who like never before feels the breath of the investigators who have spent almost two years lifting all the carpets in which there could be hidden crimes. On Tuesday, on a day left for the history books, his former lawyer Michael Cohen accused him in an appearance before a judge of having ordered him to pay in exchange for his silence two women who claim to have had an extramarital relationship with the president, in order to prevent the appearance of those revelations from damaging his presidential campaign in 2016.

For his role in those payments, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating laws governing contributions to political campaigns. Which leads to the conclusion that if the lawyer violated the law, whoever allegedly ordered it must also have violated it. If that is so, the President would have committed a serious crime and could face an impeachment process, what in the American Constitution is called an impeachment.

What is impeachment?

Although the Constitution does not explicitly specify it and the Supreme Court has never ruled on it, the truth is that the president has traditionally been considered to have immunity from being accused in court while in office. So you cannot be charged with crimes until you leave the White House.

The Constitution does offer a way to remove a president, which is impeachment, a term known in Spanish as impeachment or impeachment process. This mechanism works in this way: the first step is for the House of Representatives to formulate the charges against the president by a simple majority vote. Then, once that accusation is approved, it passes to the Senate, where the trial would take place under the tutelage of the president of the Supreme Court and with the senators serving as jury. To reach a guilty verdict, the favorable vote of two thirds of the senators is needed. If that occurs, the president is automatically removed as a consequence.

Precedents

The impeachment is an extraordinary procedure has been used only twice against a president. In the first case, we must go back to 1868, when in the middle of a bitter dispute with Congress, President Andrew Johnson dismissed his Secretary of Defense, in violation of a law shortly before adopted that prohibited him from dismissing federal officials approved by the Senate. In the end, Johnson was saved by a single vote in the Senate from not losing office.

The second case is that of President Bill Clinton, who was charged in 1998 by the House of Representatives with lying under oath and obstructing justice in relation to his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the subsequent Senate trial, he was acquitted, since the two-thirds necessary for a guilty verdict were not even reached.

While President Richard Nixon is generally cited as another impeachment case, the truth is that the president resigned from office before the House of Representatives eventually charged him for his actions during the Watergate case.

Can it happen to Trump?

That's the question everyone has been asking since Cohen pointed the finger at him Tuesday, but one that experts can't agree on. First, according to an analysis by The New York Times, the legal interpretation that has prevailed so far is that the acts that the president is accused of must have been committed while he was in power, which happened in the case of Johnson, Nixon and Clinton, but not Trump's. The magnate was a candidate when he allegedly ordered payments to his alleged ex-mates.

But, therein lies the key, there is an exception: when crimes are allegedly committed to try to become president. There they would frame the facts that the president is accused of, since he allegedly committed them in order to hide information that could harm his candidacy. According to Cohen, Trump instructed him to pay Stormy Daniels. These payments, being secret and by their candies, are serious violations of campaign finance laws. Trump and his legal team insist that the payments, whose existence they had initially denied, were made with money that did not come from the campaign, and therefore do not constitute a crime.

Who in the end will have to decide if the accusations against the president, these and if others appear, are worthy of a dismissal process is the majority of the House of Representatives, which is currently in the hands of the Republicans, but after the November's midterm elections could have a Democratic majority.

That's the way it is, at least today.