What does Donald Trump really risk now
What are the chances of President Donald Trump being impeached again? Does he really risk impeachment?
As America comes to terms with the violent siege of the Capitol, a veritable assault by Trump supporters that has caused five deaths, the crisis that is accompanying the last moments of Donald Trump's presidency is spreading more and more. . Less than two weeks after his farewell to the White House, the Democratic Party is moving to impeach the President, and few Republican Party members are ready to stand up for him. But does Donald Trump really risk impeachment?
What would Donald Trump's impeachment entail?
If the House decides to proceed with impeachment, the action would make Trump the first President in history to be impeached twice during his term. It had already happened in December of 2019, when the US President was accused of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. If, before his departure, this time it comes to an impeachment, Trump could be banned from holding public office, preventing him from running - again - for elections in 2024.
But, besides the possibility of no longer being able to stand as a candidate, would there be other consequences for Trump? In fact, the impeachment could end exactly like the last time, with a mark on his criminal record following the action taken by the House of Representatives, but he could remain in office until the end of his term. Alternatively, the indictment process could be opened at a later time, after Joe Biden's oath, when the Democrats will have a majority in the Senate, but in this case government approval is required to proceed. , and this would entail a slowdown in the work, postponing the commitments on the agenda of the new President, such as the drafting of a precise plan to deal with the Coronavirus emergency and the approval of the aid package for those affected by the crisis. With these being the priorities of Biden's electoral program, the question to ask at this point is: is he really willing to do it, despite the country's priorities?
The tight deadlines
"We need to act," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday, January 9 during a private conference call with Democrats. The topic of the discussion? Trump's resignation earlier than expected. For this reason he intends to proceed with the impeachment, which should arrive in the House on Monday 11 January, with the calling of a vote set for the following Wednesday. However, there is little chance that the Senate, currently with a Republican majority, will give the green light to a trial that leads to Trump's conviction in less than two weeks.
Furthermore, the Senate will not resume work from the calendar until January 20, which is the day of the Inauguration Day. It takes two thirds of the Senate to arrive at a condemnation of Trump, and the tight deadlines make everything very unlikely, even if the work of the Chamber resumed on purpose in advance. What's more, while many Republican senators have discredited Trump's actions over the past week, several of them have already said they believe impeachment would further divide the country shortly before Biden's inauguration, thus expressing their opposition to proceeding. .
An impeachment investigation requires the sending of evidence to the Judicial Commission of the Chamber, which should then be followed by specific hearings and the drafting of articles that then justify the decisions, which in turn must then be disclosed. As it happened in 2019, when the House indicted Trump, and in that case it took 3 months.
What could happen this time, however, is that with so few days to move, Pelosi could hold a vote without hearings or move with committee action, requiring only majority approval to proceed. It must be said, in this regard, that the Democrats control the House with the election of Biden and, considering that at the time of the assault on Capitol Hill most of the members of Congress were in the Capitol when the crowd raided, many could already have clear ideas about Trump's "faults", which could induce them to proceed without wasting further time.
Is there really a risk of nuclear war?
Meanwhile, as many members of the Trump administration withdrew their support, a group of Republicans in the US House, the same one who voted to certify the results of the last election, formally asked the newly elected president to intervene to prevent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to try to accuse Donald Trump again: "In the spirit of healing and fidelity to the Constitution," they wrote.
In Congress, however, the Democrats are unwilling to take any further risks, even if his term of office is only a few days away. The chaos that erupted at the Capitol stunned the world and threatened the traditional (and peaceful) handover of power. As if that were not enough, Pelosi also spoke of a concrete risk linked to nuclear codes, so much so that he summoned Mark Milley, president of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General (leading body of the United States Department of Defense), to discuss the precautions available " to prevent an 'unstable' President from initiating military hostilities or accessing launch codes for nuclear warfare.
The incumbent president, in fact, has the exclusive authority to order the launch of a nuclear weapon, but a military commander could refuse the order if it were deemed illegal. Trump has not made such threats publicly, but there are many officials who have not ruled out this possibility.
