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"For Trump, impeachment is likely, removal is dubious, and a re-election campaign is all but certain," write Kristen Nyman and Anthony Marcum.
Three impeachment scenarios dangerous for democracy
Nyman is a government affairs specialist and Marcum is a governance fellow at the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan and pro-free-market public policy research organization.
Imagine the following: Early next year the House of Representatives impeaches President Trump. One of these three scenarios is likely to follow.
Behind curtain number one, the president is acquitted at the subsequent trial in the Senate. He then takes the stage in Charlotte, N.C., to accept the Republican nomination for president in 2020.
Behind curtain number two, the Senate convicts the president and he is removed from office — yet he still takes the stage in Charlotte to accept the 2020 nomination.
Behind curtain number three, the president, having been impeached by the House, resigns from office. Nonetheless, he still makes his way to Charlotte to accept the 2020 nomination.
Each scenario is both possible and constitutional. Worse still, they are nationally unprecedented and each has the potential to severely damage our political institutions.
Because Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before an impeachment vote by the full House, we have only two presidential impeachments to draw on for our analysis: those of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. As in these cases, an impeachment vote is the most likely outcome. A simple majority in the House suffices to impeach a sitting president. Today, Democrats hold a majority of the seats. More than 220 of them already support taking action on impeachment.
Once a president is impeached he faces the possibility of removal from office. Removal of a sitting president entails a higher burden than does impeachment: It requires a trial before the Senate, presided over by the chief justice of the United States. A two-thirds majority is required for conviction on each count brought by the House. Being found guilty on any single charge means Trump's removal from office. According to current rules and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's own words, the Senate would be compelled to hold a trial. Yet given the Republican majority in the Senate, it is likely that — just as in past instances — the vote fails to reach that supermajority threshold.
If that happens, the Constitution permits a second Senate sanction: "disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States." In other words, a vote for disqualification would forbid the president from running for federal office ever again.
And yet, barring a Senate vote in favor of this sanction, the president's removal from his current office is not tied to disqualification from holding future federal office. As Ohio State law professor Edward Foley observes, "The Senate's practice in impeachment cases has been to hold separate votes on removal and disqualification." Indeed, in our nation's history, there have been only eight successful impeachment convictions, and of those, only three of the individuals impeached were prohibited from holding future office.
In other words, though the likelihood of Trump being removed from office is slim, unless the Senate subsequently votes to disqualify him from holding future office he could run for president again in 2020. This would be an unparalleled event in American history and open the door to many uncomfortable situations.
The president's unprecedented post-impeachment campaign would face off against an unprecedented challenger. Polling indicates the likely Democratic nominee will either be a senator who could cast a vote to remove Trump from office or the individual whose family was central to the Ukraine machinations that sparked the initial impeachment inquiry. In fact, eight of the potential Democratic nominees are sitting members of Congress who would be involved in the impeachment or removal process — a scenario that seems more appropriate as a chapter out of Hobbes' "Leviathan" than legitimate political procedure.
Yet it could very well happen. After all, Trump's quiet retirement is unlikely, and the president has shown an eagerness to reinstate a full political campaign. Both the political and legal realities support his fervor.
The political groundwork for Trump's 2020 campaign, too, has already been laid. Even if he were to lose the support of voters, the Republican National Committee would have no time to present a viable contender before the primary season, which begins in four short months.
Another discouraging note: If Trump is impeached, it will mean two out of the last four American presidents have been sanctioned in this manner — both in the last 21 years. Before Nixon and Watergate in the 1970s, 11 decades elapsed between presidential impeachment attempts. It is not as though more than six scores of American history were devoid of scandal — the Grant Whiskey Ring and Teapot Dome representing just the tip of the abuse-of-executive-power iceberg.
As the partisan divide deepens and impeachment proceedings intensify, the courts may very well need to adjudicate new or unforeseen constitutional questions. On these issues, if the Supreme Court is thrown into the fray, it risks dangerously tying the judiciary to the politics of impeachment and increasing the public's growing cynicism toward the third branch.
For Trump, impeachment is likely, removal is dubious, and a re-election campaign is all but certain. This domino effect of unprecedented circumstances poses uncomfortable questions that challenge our democratic norms and could fatally weaken our longstanding institutions.
How does impeachment work? - Alex Gendler
What exactly is impeachment and how does the process work? Learn about the checks and balances put in place by the Constitution.
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Computer company Hewlett Packard received a perfect score from the index for its policies on political spending disclosure.
Big companies disclosing more could-be-secret political spending, analysis shows
An increasing number of the country's largest publicly traded companies are disclosing more than ever about political spending habits that the law permits them to keep secret.
That's the central finding of the fifth annual report from a group of academics and corporate ethicists, who say the average score among the biggest companies traded on American exchanges, the S&P 500, has gone up each year since 2014.
Though corporate political action committees must disclose their giving to candidates, those numbers are very often dwarfed by the donations businesses make to the trade associations and other outside groups that have driven so much of the steady rise in spending on elections. Conservatives say robust disclosure of these behaviors is the best form of regulating money in politics and is working fine, and this new report reflects that. Those who say campaign finance needs more assertive federal regulation will argue such corporate transparency is inconsistent and inadequate to the task, and the new report underscores that.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is joined by fellow Democratic members of the House and Senate this summer to discuss legislation that would attempt to prevent hacking into the country's election systems. Intelligence officials announced late last week an outline for how to release information about possible hacks during the 2020 elections.
Intel community promising more transparency about election hacking efforts
A year from the presidential election, U.S. intelligence agencies have adopted a new framework for how they will inform candidates, groups and the public about attempts to disrupt our country's elections by foreign operatives.
But the one-page summary of the plan, released late last week, is so general that it remains unclear what the intelligence community plans to do if and when it discovers something suspicious.
The summary by the director of national intelligence states that the federal government will "follow a process and principles designed to ensure, to the greatest extent possible, that notification decisions are consistent, well-informed and unbiased."
The new framework is designed to prevent a repeat of some of what happened after the 2016 election.