Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, who testified as a Democrat witness in the House Judiciary Committee’s public hearings on impeachment, argues President Donald Trump is technically not impeached until the House submits the articles to the Senate.
In a Bloomberg News opinion-editorial published Thursday, Feldman writes the definition of impeachment, according to the framers, “assumed that impeachment was a process, not just a House vote,” and impeachment is official only when the articles are transmitted to the Senate, where lawmakers are “obliged by the Constitution to hold a trial.”
Feldman writes:
If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president. If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.
That’s because “impeachment” under the Constitution means the House sending its approved articles of to the Senate, with House managers standing up in the Senate and saying the president is impeached.
As for the headlines we saw after the House vote saying, “TRUMP IMPEACHED,” those are a media shorthand, not a technically correct legal statement. So far, the House has voted to impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn’t impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the Senate and the House members deliver the message.
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