Former WA Attorney General: More Republicans should have voted to impeach Trump
Jan 14, 2021, 12:10 PM | Updated: 12:24 pm
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., walks to the chamber at the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, with Democrats in the House joined by 10 Republicans. Despite the relative bipartisan support, former Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna believes more Republicans should have joined their colleagues across the aisle.
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“It would have been good, in my view, if more Republicans in the House had voted for impeachment yesterday,” McKenna told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross.
Washington state’s own Congressional delegation saw nine of its 10 representatives vote in favor of impeachment, including two Republicans. The lone holdout was Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
As the Senate trial moves forward, it could prove difficult to underscore the weight of Trump’s second impeachment. In recent years, McKenna believes that impeachment has become a tool that’s largely been overused in American politics, including the first time it occurred with Trump, as well as with Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. President George W. Bush also faced frequent calls for impeachment throughout his White House tenure.
“I think we have devalued impeachment as a feature of the system of checks and balances that we have,” McKenna said. “It’s unfortunate that now, yesterday’s impeachment is being looked at in a kind of a devalued way by a lot of Republicans.”
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Wednesday’s impeachment proceedings were all part of a larger effort by Democrats and a small cadre of Congressional Republicans to ensure that Trump never holds public office again.
That strategy is rooted in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was passed after the Civil War to prevent former Confederate generals, officers, and soldiers from holding office in the newly-reunified United States. Using that as a basis for keeping Trump from running for president in 2024 would entail a lengthy process, separate from impeachment, in both Congress and the courts.
As McKenna describes it, the following would have to happen:
The way it appears to work is that there would have to be a majority vote in Congress in the House and the Senate expressing the lawmakers’ opinion that this section of Amendment 14 applies to a particular officeholder. But then the courts would have to come in and make a legal declaration. They would have to come in and say that, given that opinion — and perhaps they would consider other facts as well — under Section Three of Amendment 14, Donald Trump could not hold office.
Whether that would succeed remains to be seen, given that the 14th Amendment has never before been used to prevent a former U.S. president from running for reelection.
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