Impeachment is a lengthy process, however, and it may be practically impossible to convene a trial before Jan. 20. As my colleague Nicholas Fandos explains, the Senate is not in session, and all 100 senators would have to agree to change the schedule, a highly unlikely prospect. “Trying to remove Trump from office for a second time would be a fitting way to signal how many Americans consider him a dangerous demagogue,” Yascha Mounk writes in The Atlantic. “But it would likely fail.”
As an alternative, David E. Kendall argues in The Washington Post, Congress should instead move to censure the president, which it could do in a matter of days. “While not entirely satisfying, a strong bipartisan censure resolution is the most effective way of forging a speedy, clear and enduring public sanction against Trump’s conduct,” he writes. “While admittedly symbolic, it is what is needed at this moment: an immediate bipartisan judgment that is strong, unequivocal, indelible and undeniable, a clear judgment that Trump’s conduct was a profound betrayal of both his duty and the basic legal rules of our democratic republic.”
But if Congress has only symbolic gestures at its disposal, it might as well choose its grandest, Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker. “Congress should impeach Trump, even — and maybe especially — if the act is only symbolic,” he writes, noting how, as the historian David Blight told him, the impunity former Confederates enjoyed in the wake of the Civil War paved the way not for reconciliation but for white revanchism. “Congress has a similar opportunity to the one it had in 1865: to punish a political crime, and so to shape its memory.”
And that punishment, the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argues, must come from Congress. That the president himself incited the mob, he writes, “makes it an actual attack on the separation of powers: an attempt, by the executive, to subvert the legislature by force and undermine the foundation of constitutional government.” Such an attack, in his view, compels the legislative branch to reassert its strongest power to check the presidency, and that power is impeachment: “Here, Congress doesn’t need courage. It just needs a sense of self-preservation.”
But even some who believe the case for impeachment is right on the merits caution that it could backfire for Democrats. As Markus Wagner notes in The Conversation, Mr. Biden himself is lukewarm about the prospect, no doubt because a Senate trial would eat into the first days of his term. “This would distract from the critical goals Biden has for his first 100 days and beyond,” he writes. “Last, but not least, it would make confirmation of Biden’s cabinet picks more difficult.”
That seems to be the view of James Clyburn, the third-most powerful Democrat in the House, who told CNN on Sunday that Democrats ought to wait until the spring to pursue impeachment further. Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, struck a similar note, maintaining that “President Biden’s going to want the Senate to spend their time, at least near term, getting his cabinet approved.”
But other lawmakers insist that waiting simply isn’t an option. “If we allow insurrection against the United States with impunity, with no accountability, we are inviting it to happen again,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told ABC on Monday. “This is an immediate danger right now.”