
[Ed. – The question of whether a former president can even be impeached is still open to debate.]
The House dispensed with every ordinary procedure around impeachment this week and wrote an article on the fly and passed it immediately.
The rush is understandable in one sense — Trump’s offense was grave, and if the House had hewed to anything like regular procedure it wouldn’t have impeached Trump until after he left office, which it wanted to avoid.
If the point of the exercise was simply to impeach Trump a second time, the rush isn’t a problem. Trump is, indeed, impeached a second time. But if the House actually wants to get a conviction in the Senate, I believe it’s going to regret how it’s gone about this.
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The article is sloppily written, and taking a day or two to have hearings with Republicans taking shots at it might have prompted Democrats to tighten up the text before putting it on the floor.