Impeachment 2.0

The only precedent for the second impeachment of President Donald J. Trump was that of William W. Belknap, President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War during Reconstruction, who was tried and acquitted by the U.S. Senate after resigning from office. An investigation into the War Department was launched. Under Belknap the U.S. Army was used in combination with the Justice Department to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan, a policy opposed by most Democrats.^[1] Senate Democrat Majority leader Chuck Schumer said, “The Senate convened a trial, and voted, as a chamber, that Mr. Belknap could be tried ‘for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office.’ The language is crystal clear, without any ambiguity,” quoting a resolution by Senator Allen G. Thurman, who opposed President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and campaigned against allowing black people to vote.^[2]

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