On January 14, 2021, President Donald Trump was impeached a second time, with the charge being that he incited the riot of January 6th, in which several hundred fringe right protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol, with four of them dying. Additionally, his call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was added. While whether his words in the speech being incitement would hold up in court is questionable given that most of the rally participants didn’t storm the Capitol and that there was no direct call to violence, what is not questionable is that Trump pushed a most destructive lie in his “Stop the Steal” media campaign: that the election was stolen from him on account of voter fraud, and that the storming of the Capitol wouldn’t have occurred without this lie and the rally. However, since the Senate reconvenes on January 19th, it is impossible that a trial will be held before he leaves office the following day. Thus, the question here is, can the president be impeached after he has left office? On a national scale, there are two precedents that we can consult.
Precedent #1: William Blount, 1797.
The first precedent that can be cited is the case of Senator William Blount of Tennessee. Blount, who had been a signatory of the U.S. Constitution, found upon being elected one of Tennessee’s first two senators that his ventures into land speculation had placed him deep in debt, and only his position as a senator had kept him out of debtor’s prison. He thus hatched a scheme to address this problem with Great Britain, which was currently at war with Spain, and the latter was rumored to be selling Florida and its New Orleans territory to Revolutionary France. Blount conspired to lead a group of white settlers and Choctaw Indians to conquer these lands and turn control of them to Britain, thus raising the depressed value of his land. An incriminating letter written by him managed to make it into the hands of President John Adams, who sent a message to Congress that was read aloud, to Blount’s horror. The Senate voted to “sequester” his seat, which was de facto expulsion, by a 25-1 vote on July 8, 1797 for his violation of US neutrality law. However, they also wanted to impeach him and tried to have him brought back to the Capitol, but Blount was under protection in Tennessee. The proceedings occurred in his absence, and his defense argued two points, that senators were not “civil officers” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause and that since Blount was already expelled that he was no longer under the jurisdiction of the Senate.
Blount’s impeachment was dismissed 14-11 on January 11, 1799, with all Jeffersonian Republicans voting to dismiss and Federalists voting against 7-11. The Senate had found him to not be an impeachable officer. Whether the senators had agreed with one of or both of the defense’s arguments is in question. No member of the legislative branch has been impeached since, with expulsion being the chosen method since of kicking them out of office. Despite Blount having been an expelled senator, he managed to continue having a political career in his home state, whose residents didn’t seem to mind that he had engaged in such a scheme. Future President Andrew Jackson, for instance, remained a loyal supporter. He served as speaker of the Tennessee Senate from December 3, 1798 until his death from an epidemic on March 21, 1800.
Precedent #2: William Belknap, 1876.
The second precedent that can be cited is William Belknap. Belknap was President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War from 1869 to 1876 and was one of the reasons his administration became notorious for corruption. He regularly threw lavish parties in Washington that brought into question how he could afford to do so. On March 1, 1876, the House’s Clymer Committee, which had been set up to investigate Belknap, discovered a reason why. In 1870, he crafted an arrangement after he appointed at the behest of his wife Carita contractor Caleb P. Marsh as head of the trading post at Fort Sill in the Oklahoma Territory despite John S. Evans already being appointed to the post. This permitted Evans to remain head provided he allocate $12,000 in annual profits to Marsh, while Marsh had to pay half the sum to Belknap’s wife. After his wife and their child died, Belknap received the payments, and after marrying his late wife’s sister, Amanda, they shared the $6000. The House promptly drafted the impeachment and on March 2, 1876, Belknap tearfully handed his resignation to President Grant minutes before he was unanimously impeached. Despite his resignation, the Senate decided to consider an impeachment trial. All senators were agreed that he had accepted kickbacks from Marsh, but the question was whether an officer of the government could be impeached after having left office.
On May 29, 1876, the Senate voted 37-29 to declare as its opinion that Belknap could be impeached after he left office. Democrats voted 24-2 that this could be done while Republicans voted 13-27 against. However, although the majority of senators voted for all counts of impeachment none reached the needed threshold of 40 votes, and it failed on August 1st based on the objections as to the constitutionality of it by the minority. Belknap never held public office again yet remained popular with the veterans of his home state of Iowa and died in 1890. Perhaps if the Senate had mustered 40 votes for conviction, this would have been a decisive precedent and we wouldn’t be debating this today. Also interesting to note is that if Democrats vote in the case of Trump that this is proper and Republicans vote against, it would reaffirm their old positions about late impeachments.
What we have here are two deeply unsatisfying precedents even though they involve two clearly guilty men. While Blount’s case was dismissed by the Senate, this could have been that senators didn’t think that members of the Senate were part of the definition of “civil officers” under the Constitution and not because they thought late impeachments were unconstitutional. The Belknap case is a bit more revealing as it deals with a cabinet officer whose trial took place after his resignation and doesn’t have the added complication of him being a senator, and although the Senate officially opined that it could be done, not enough senators agreed this was constitutional to warrant a conviction. We have a precedent for the Senate holding such a trial, but no consensus on whether this action was constitutional. After all, it’s not like Congress hasn’t acted in ways that were found unconstitutional before.
The division as to whether late impeachments can be tried by the Senate doesn’t seem any less divided now than it was 145 years ago: law professor Cass Sunstein and former appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig hold that late impeachments are not constitutional, while law professors Michael Gerhardt and Brian Kalt hold that they are, with the former believing that the impeachment itself must have happened while the officeholder was in office. What we have never seen, and what would be truly satisfying as a precedent, would be a conviction or a judicial ruling on whether this is constitutional. However, the Supreme Court has not been willing to intervene in Senate impeachment convictions so far: in the case of Nixon v. United States (1993), in which Judge Walter Nixon challenged his impeachment conviction for perjury, the court unanimously ruled that the matter was a political question and not subject to Supreme Court review, although some of the more liberal justices left open in a concurrence whether an “unjust” impeachment conviction could be appealed. This suggests that whether an impeachment trial is constitutional is almost if not entirely up to the Senate itself. In conclusion, this is a major gray area, and I cannot say I’m decided on which is right here.
Edit, 11/23/21: I have upon re-inspection of this post edited out the “murder”. Although officer Brian Sicknick was attacked by the mob on January 6th, in April the report of D.C.’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Francisco Diaz, revealed he had died of two strokes the day after. This was contrary to media reports at the time of his death.
References
Eschner, K. (2017, July 7). This 1797 Impeachment Has Never Been Fully Resolved. Smithsonian Magazine.
Retrieved from
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1797-impeachment-has-never-been-fully-resolved-180963926/
Folmsbee, S.J. (1979). Blount, William. NCpedia.
Retrieved from
https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/blount-william
Fowler, R. (2019, February 27). Blount on the Run. Tennessee Bar Journal, 55(3).
Retrieved from
McFeely, W.S. (1981). Grant: A biography. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Nixon v. United States, 506, U.S. 224. (1993).
The Expulsion Case of William Blount of Tennessee (1797). United States Senate.
Retrieved from
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/expulsion/Blount_expulsion.htm
The First Impeachment. United States Senate.
Retrieved from
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The-First-Impeachment.htm
War Secretary’s Impeachment Trial. United States Senate.
Retrieved from
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/War_Secretarys_Impeachment_Trial.htm
Weiss, D.C. (2021, January 13). As House impeaches Trump for second time, some say Senate trial after his presidency is unconstitutional. ABA Journal.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 
For the Belknap conviction vote in the Senate, was there a clear divide between the Stalwarts and Half-Breeds for the Republicans? For example, I’m noticing among the former that Sens. Logan, Conkling, Allison, and Frelinghuysen voted “nay” and in the latter faction that Edmunds voted “yea,” though don’t know enough yet about most of the Senate GOP members listed.
It doesn’t seem to me that’s the case. Divisions between such groups seem to at best appear in nominations for posts like Collector for the Port of New York, as the whole matter of “Stalwarts” and “Half-Breeds” surrounded patronage and seems from my research to have no broader ideological implications, similar to the term “Radical Republicans” only having application to Reconstruction policy. Thank you for posting this response by the way, as it reminded me that I needed to correct that contrary to media reports at the time, Officer Sicknick had died of natural causes the day after the Capitol storming.
You’re welcome. Now, while the primary division between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds was over patronage, I was thinking that the factionalism may have extended to the Belknap impeachment, as the Stalwarts seemed to adamantly support the Grant Administration despite the latter’s corruption, which the Half-Breeds opposed.
I’m currently reading “George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans” by Richard E. Welch, Jr. which seems to say that early Half-Breeds like Hoar (and not Blaine in the context of the 1870s, interestingly enough) resented the corruption surrounding Grant, who Stalwarts rallied around in hoping to elect for a third presidential term later in 1880. And indeed, Hoar was among the Republicans who advocated impeaching and convicting Belknap.