Donald Trump became the first president of the United States to be imperative twice. 10 Republicans opposed Trump

What happened in the House of Representatives?

On January 13, 2021, the House of US Representatives , under unprecedented security measures, voted for the impeachment of the current president Donald Trump. 232 people voted for impeachment, against 197. Moreover, among those who voted “for” there were 10 republicans - this is twice as much as the democrats who voted for the impeachment of their one -party worker Bill Clinton in 1998.

The vote was held a week after the attempt to storm the Congress building supporters and exactly a week before the formal expiration of his powers. So he became the first president in the history of the United States to be imperative twice during his first - and, possibly, the only time. The first impeachment was declared to Trump by the House of Representatives in December 2019 (then all the Republicans voted against, but the Democrats had a majority), but the Senate refused to remove him from power.

What he was accused then

Trump was found guilty of abuse of powers, as well as in preventing justice due to refusal to cooperate with the investigation. The voices were distributed in accordance with the party affiliation: all the democrats voted for impeachment, almost all the Republicans were against it. The Senate, where the majority had the majority of the Republicans, did not support Trump's removal from office. The reason for the impeachment was Trump’s conversation with the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky, during which the American leader urgently asked to resume the investigation against the Ukrainian company Burisma, whose board of directors included the son of Joe Biden Hunter. Trump's opponents considered this an attempt to take advantage of the presidential authority for personal purposes

The day before, the congressmen-democrats published the text of a resolution of Trump of particularly serious crimes and “inciting to the rebellion” against the US government and called, according to the 14th amendment to the Constitution, to deprive him of the opportunity to run to the elected positions.

Prior to this, the House of Representatives by a majority vote voted for the resolution with a call to Mike Pens to terminate the powers of the president under the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which gives vice president the right to terminate the powers of the current president due to the inability to fulfill his duties. But the penalty refused to fulfill this requirement. So the second time in a year more, the question of the impeachment of Trump went to Congress.

In her speech, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi called Trump “direct and obvious threat” and called for his immediate impeachment. In the hall there were members of the House of Representatives - both democrats and republicans - who were blocked in it during the attempt to storm the building of Congress with Trump's supporters week earlier. Some of them, including the Republicans, who had previously approved the victory of Joe Biden in the same hall - told reporters about the threats from the ultra -right extremists.

Unlike the last attempt to declare the impeachment of Trump, for which not a single Republican voted, this time five Republicans were promised to give votes for the resolution, including the daughter of former Vice President Liz Chaini. During the debate, several more people joined them.

Other Republican congressmen claimed that during the rally on January 6, Trump did not call for violent actions that ended with the storm of Congress building and human victims. Some, however, did not argue with the fact that the president’s words could be regarded as a call to violence, but reproached the democrats in a hurry during the procedure. In addition, they recalled how democrats supported attacks on supermarkets and large stores in the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter movement.

In addition, some prominent Republicans both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate (for example, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Linja Graham Judicial System) condemning Trump as a whole, spoke out against impeachment, since it, in their opinion, will not serve the unity of the country at such a difficult time. Moreover, part of Trump’s defenders accused the democrats of creating a dangerous precedent of the use of impeachment as a method of political revenge, and directly threatened that they could use it against the elected president Joe Biden .

Biden himself also did not support the efforts of his one -party people in impeachment - he intends to complete the process of transferring power as soon as possible and engage in the most urgent problems of America, primarily the Pandemia of Coronavirus. The voltage growth between parties can prevent him from the appointment of the most important officials, which the Senate claims.

And what's next?

Now Trump's fate will be decided in the Senate. The upper chamber should act as a court, which brings the current president of violation of the articles of the Constitution. If two -thirds of the senators vote for charges at least one point in the resolution, the president will lose her authority. In this case, theoretically, the Senate may also prohibit Trump to occupy certain positions - in particular, re -elect to the presidency.

But the first meeting of the Senate in the new year should take place only on January 19 - the day before the formal expiration of the deadline for Donald Trump. The head of the republican (so far, before the beginning of the powers of the new democrats, elected on the re-election in Georgia ), the majority in the Senate Mitch MacConnell refused to move this meeting on an earlier date. Theoretically, the Senate meeting on impeachment may take place even after the inauguration of Joe Biden, but in the US judicial system there is no court of the court over the president who has already left their post. Many experts believe that the provisions of the US Constitution governing the impeachment and court on it relate only to civil servants - to which Trump will cease to be January 20, 2021.

In any case, unlike the House of Representatives, where a simple majority is enough, the Senate requires at least 2/3 of the vote to condemn the president. That is, the Democrats even with the majority that they will soon receive will still have to attract at least 17 republicans to their side. So far it does not look too likely.

Alexey Kovalev and Dmitry Kartsev