The Senate’s 55-45 vote on Sen. Rand Paul’s motion to find the second, retroactive impeachment of President Trump unconstitutional, appeared to show next-to-no- chance for a vote to convict Trump on the Democrats’ charge tortured out of the 14th Amendment.
According to legal expert Jonathan Turley in an opinion column in The Hill Jan. 30, two Senators—Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) have now proposed a censure resolution as a “compromise,” which remains under color of the 14th Amendment and is a “conviction” of Trump under another name. “According to Kaine,” he wrote, “the censure resolution would make two findings `that it was an insurrection and that President Trump gave aid and comfort to the insurrectionists.” Kaine and Collins attempt to defend this “work-around of an unattainable impeachment conviction” as “part of the authority of Congress over any citizen under the 14th Amendment.”
This, in Turley’s view, fully unconstitutional maneuver would censure Trump as a President, though no longer in office, then by a simple majority vote bar him from holding any future public office as a private citizen, under the 14th Amendment.
