Cato: Mob Rule Is No Path to Liberty

 Yesterday, Congress was violently disrupted as it performed its constitutional duty. This was a direct attack on the Constitution of the United States, the rule of law, and our constitutional republic.

For more than two months President Trump has claimed, without plausible evidence and through multiple recounts and court cases, that he won the presidential election. As Cato scholars and many others have explained, the president’s attempts to overturn the election are factually and legally baseless. His allegations of fraud have been consistently rejected by courts, state legislatures, governors and secretaries of state, and members of both parties in Congress.

Despite this, the president has persisted, and too many members of Congress have echoed his claims. By doing so, they have helped stoke the flames of distrust and division in ways that present a profound threat to liberty, and they must bear some responsibility for the actions that have followed.

Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/mob-rule-no-path-liberty

Cato: Impeachment, the 25th Amendment and Trump’s Final Days

 We started the week with an impeachment debate that looked like a rewarmed version of the one we had last year. “Read the transcript!”: when President Donald Trump got on the phone Saturday to lean on Georgia election officials, was it another “perfect call” or a second, sordid shakedown attempt?

By yesterday afternoon we were in entirely new territory: a violent mob storming and trashing the Capitol, four dead, guns and explosives seized, Congress evacuated, Vice President Mike Pence fleeing a mob inspired by the president’s tweets. “We will never concede,” Trump fumed at the pre‐​riot rally, “you don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We’re not going to take it any more.… if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” Howard Beale only asked people to yell out of their windows, and he didn’t have nuclear weapons.

As of Wednesday night there were at least 32 House Democrats publicly calling for a second impeachment. Though both houses are supposedly done working until after inauguration, an article of impeachment has already been drafted for circulation. And today, the incoming Senate Majority Leader called on Pence and the Cabinet to trigger the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power.

Can Congress do either of those things? Both? How might the Constitution’s presidential defenestration provisions work here? Let’s take a look.

First, impeachment: the article of impeachment being circulated now charges Trump with making “statements that encouraged—and foreseeably resulted in—imminent lawless action at the Capitol.” Is incitement to riot an impeachable offense? Yes: it’s not even a hard question.

Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/impeachment-25th-amendment-trumps-final-days