With only a week left in his term, the House impeached President Trump, but he will leave office before he stands trial in the Senate. Here’s how the process works.
WASHINGTON — The second impeachment of President Trump, coming a week after he egged on a mob of supporters to storm the Capitol, is taking place with extraordinary speed and testing the bounds of the process itself while also raising questions never contemplated before. Here’s what we know.
Impeachment is one of the Constitution’s gravest penalties.
Impeachment is one of the weightiest tools the Constitution gives Congress to hold government officials, including the president, accountable for misconduct and abuse of power.
Members of the House consider whether to impeach the president — the equivalent of an indictment in a criminal case — and members of the Senate consider whether to remove him, holding a trial in which senators act as the jury. The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”