Senate votes to acquit Trump in impeachment trial. So what happens next?
The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to acquit President Donald Trump on impeachment charges brought by the House of Representatives late last year.
That means Trump won’t be removed from the White House and can remain in office through at least January 2021, when the winner of the November 2020 presidential election will take office.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah announced Wednesday that he would cross party lines to join Democrats in supporting Trump’s conviction. Romney supported the article charging Trump with abuse of power, but voted against the article charging him with obstruction of Congress.
Only a simple majority of House members was needed to approve the two articles of impeachment against the president. But votes from a two-thirds majority of senators would have been needed to convict and remove Trump from office.
Democrats in the House say Trump withheld $400 million in military aid from Ukraine in order to get that country to investigate political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
The House Judiciary Committee released a report in December outlining the two articles of impeachment and evidence against Trump.
The report states: “Taken together, the articles charge that President Trump has placed his personal, political interests above our national security, our free and fair elections, and our system of checks and balances. He has engaged in a pattern of misconduct that will continue if left unchecked. Accordingly, President Trump should be impeached and removed from office.”
So what happens next?
In terms of removing Trump from office, Democrats’ focus moves to the 2020 election.
At the impeachment trial, Trump’s lawyers argued that the choice to remove a president should have been left to the voters in November — and that Democrats were undermining American voters’ will by trying to remove him.
Democrats’ House impeachment managers countered that impeachment was the appropriate recourse because Trump was accused of trying to influence the 2020 election itself by pushing Ukraine’s leader to investigate Biden, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president.
What will the Congress move to next?
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in an email to McClatchy News on Tuesday that guidance for the Senate’s plans past the vote would be released soon.
The Republican-controlled Senate has functioned exclusively as an impeachment court since the trial began, with senators sitting as silent jurors while both sides made their cases.
A spokesperson for Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York did not respond to a request for comment about Democrats’ priorities moving forward.
A schedule released by Senate Democrats this week shows that, following Wednesday’s failed impeachment vote, senators will have until Feb. 26 “to have printed statements and opinions in the Congressional Record, explaining their votes and include those in the documentation of the Impeachment Proceedings; the two-page rule has been waived.”
Meanwhile, in the Democratic-controlled House, probes into the president will go on.
“The investigations and oversight will continue,” said Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Reform Committee, according to Bloomberg. “We’ve got several cases.”
Bloomberg reports that the “House will keep seeking a wide range of evidence and testimony as they look into Trump’s administration, his policies and his businesses and finances. They also plan to keep a focus on his conduct in dealing with Ukraine.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California hasn’t said if House Democrats will seek more testimony in the Ukraine case that the impeachment revolved around, including from ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton, according to Bloomberg.
Pelosi has told reporters, per Bloomberg, that “we’ll see what happens. No matter what the senators have the courage or not to do, he will be impeached forever.”
What does it mean for Trump?
Some voters have suggested impeachment could help Trump’s political fortunes.
“I think he gets re-elected because of what Democrats are doing,” Tracy Root of Des Moines said at a rally the president held in Iowa, according to the BBC. “They couldn’t beat him at the polls, so they’ve got to impeach him.”
Historians and experts said the impeachment vote could have reverberations years from now.
“The Republicans have embraced a theory that permits future abuses of power,” said New York University historian Timothy Naftali, the Washington Post reports. “The outcome of acquittal was predictable . . . but I’m afraid that this process in the Senate is more enabling of an abusive president than expected.”
The Post also quoted American historian and author John Meacham as saying that “the president’s party, instead of being a check on an individual’s impulses and ambitions, has become an instrument of them.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 1:33 PM with the headline "Senate votes to acquit Trump in impeachment trial. So what happens next?."
