How does one become impeached

The American Constitution, which is basically a rulebook for US citizens, states the president can be impeached and removed from office for a number of offences. These include "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours". The process of impeachment is started by the House of Representatives, which is one half of the US Congress, their version of Parliament. More than half of politicians there have to vote for impeachment for it to happen. When, or if, that vote passes a trial is held in the Senate - the second half of Congress.

This is a bit like a courtroom, where other senior politicians called senators act like a jury to decide whether or not a president is guilty. A this trial, two-thirds of senators must vote in favour of impeaching the president in order to remove him or her from the job. The last US president to be impeached - when the House of Representatives voted in favour of the process - was Bill Clinton in So it's important to understand that impeachment does not automatically mean that a president will be removed from the job.

Up until now, no US president has been removed from office as a result of impeachment. The one who probably came closest was Richard Nixon. But he quit as President of the United States in before impeachment proceedings could begin, and would have most likely removed him from office.

Now that Mr Trump has been impeached, if he's found guilty at his trial in the Senate and removed from power, the vice-president Mike Pence would take the oath of office and become the next US president. The founders intentionally kept the term "high crimes and misdemeanors" vague, because impeachment is meant to be a political act, not a legal one.

Unlike in criminal law, there are no clear rules for evaluating when a president has stepped over the constitutional line. The founders rejected the term "maladministration" as grounds for impeachment. They didn't want a president tossed out simply because Congress didn't think he was doing a good job. Alexander Hamilton said impeachable offenses were those that involved abuse of public trust.

The term is generally understood to mean abuse of office that results in harm to the public. Most of the articles of impeachment accused him of violating a federal law, since repealed, that said a president could not remove certain officials without Senate approval. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon in , charging him with:. The House approved two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton in , charging him with:.

Three committees in the House — Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs — are conducting investigations, gathering documents and calling witnesses in the inquiry into Trump. In the Clinton impeachment, one committee, the House Judiciary, relied heavily on a report compiled by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who led the investigation, that listed 11 possible grounds for impeachment in four categories — perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and abuse of power.

The process of voting on the articles, known as the committee mark-up, will be televised and will likely take place over several days. House Judiciary took six days to recommend articles of impeachment against Nixon in July and three days to recommend articles of impeachment against Clinton in December If approved by a simple majority, the articles are reported to the full House and are privileged, meaning they can come up for immediate consideration, including potentially several days of debate.

The president is impeached if the House approves any of the articles of impeachment by a simple majority vote. The House then appoints members to serve as "managers," or prosecutors, for the Senate trial.

The Constitution imposes no such requirement, and House rules don't either, even though authorizing resolutions were passed in each of the three previous presidential impeachments. Peter Rodino, D-N. But the current House leadership has said that such a resolution isn't needed, because the relevant committees already have the necessary subpoena and staffing authority.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone is correct in saying that the House "has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision" by passing a resolution. But such a vote is not required.

The House has voted to impeach federal judges without passing a resolution to authorize an investigation, and the House procedure for impeaching judges and presidents is the same.

Even so, House Democrats will hold a vote Thursday to clarify the rules for public hearings, even though a federal judge said on Oct. Not necessarily. A fight over this issue is now in federal court, and the House won the first round. The House leans on what happened in After a federal grand jury in Washington finished an investigation of the Watergate scandal, it prepared a special report on its findings and recommended that its work be forwarded to the House Judiciary Committee , which had begun impeachment proceedings.

Judge John Sirica ruled that while the grand jury's work was secret, he had the authority to release the material to the House.

He said that the normal reasons for keeping grand jury proceedings secret — such as preventing the escape of someone who might be indicted or insulating the grand jury from outside influence — no longer applied once the grand jury's work was done.

And he noted that Nixon did not object to letting the House committee get the material. That's an important fact. A federal appeals court agreed with Sirica's decision, and the grand jury material was turned over to the House.

Since then, the federal courts have narrowed the power of judges to declare exceptions to grand jury secrecy. Earlier this year, for example, the D.

Circuit Court of Appeals said in a different case that there's no exception allowing historians to get access. The court said it interpreted what Sirica did in Watergate as allowed under a federal rule that allows giving grand jury material to the House for "judicial proceedings.

The Justice Department's view is that the issue isn't settled. It said in a recent filing in the current lawsuit that no court has ever squarely decided whether a House impeachment proceeding qualifies as an exception to longstanding rules of grand jury secrecy. And if Trump — unlike Nixon — explicitly objects to turning the material over, that could be a decisive factor. After the House of Representatives sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate, the Senate sits as a High Court of Impeachment to consider evidence, hear witnesses, and vote to acquit or convict the impeached official.

In the case of presidential impeachment trials, the chief justice of the United States presides. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict, and the penalty for an impeached official upon conviction is removal from office.

In some cases, the Senate has also disqualified such officials from holding public offices in the future.