By Peter Baker

WASHINGTON — Barely 11 months after President Donald Trump was acquitted in a momentous Senate trial, the nation now confronts the possibility of yet another impeachment battle in the twilight of his presidency, a final showdown that will test the boundaries of politics, accountability and the Constitution.

No president has ever been impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours twice. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was weighing bringing a new article of impeachment to the House floor charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for encouraging the mob that ransacked the Capitol to disrupt the solemn process finishing his own election defeat.

If Pelosi proceeds, the House could approve the article in days, this time with the support of even some disaffected Republicans, sending it to the Senate for a new trial unlike any of the previous three in American history.

While it seemed unlikely that 17 Senate Republicans would join Democrats for the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction, the anger at Trump was so palpable that party leaders said privately it was not out of the question.

The fresh bid to remove Trump from office and strip him of his power without waiting until his term expires Jan. 20 capped a traumatic week that rattled Washington more than any since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as National Guard troops stood watch over the Capitol and downtown businesses remained boarded up.

Emotions were raw. The White House was in meltdown. The military was on edge. The Cabinet was in revolt. The Republican Party was in civil war. And an unrepentant president was in hiding, stripped of his social media bullhorn, ostracized by many allies and at odds even with his staff and loyal vice president.

The storming of the Capitol by Trump’s supporters that left five people dead, among them a police officer, transformed the politics of the city in ways that were still hard to measure. A new impeachment would be more than a do-over of the drive that failed last year because this time the offence was not a phone call to a foreign leader captured on the dry pages of a transcript but the siege of American democracy played out live on television for all to see.

“Insurrectionists incited by Mr. Trump attacked our nation’s Capitol to stop Congress from accepting the Electoral College results,” said Rep. Ted Lieu of California, who began drafting the article of impeachment with Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island while sheltering during the Capitol takeover and was later joined by Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “People died. We cannot just issue sternly worded press releases as a response. Unless Trump resigns, Congress must impeach to hold him accountable.”

With Lieu and his co-partners planning to introduce their article Monday (11) with more than 190 co-sponsors, Pelosi spent Saturday (9) consulting fellow Democrats and told them in a letter to be prepared to return to Washington within days for possible action. She did not say explicitly that she would pursue impeachment but vowed to hold Trump accountable. “There must be a recognition that this desecration was instigated by the president,” she wrote.

Yet the timing of such an effort, with less than two weeks until Trump is to leave office, scrambled the equation. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, indicated that under Senate rules a trial could not begin until Jan. 19, the day before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, meaning the process would not advance quickly enough to avert any feared dangerous moves in Trump’s last days in power.

That raised the prospect of conducting a trial after Trump vacates the White House, overshadowing the opening days of Biden’s administration at a time when he would like to turn the page and confront crises like the coronavirus pandemic, which has grown even deadlier while attention has focused on Washington’s political wars. A nationally televised trial could dominate discussion and would prevent other business in the Senate.

“If the House does send articles of impeachment over, they really get the Biden administration off to a bad start,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said in an interview Saturday. “Whether that’s the first 10 days or the first 20 days of the Biden administration, it’s certainly not how you’d want to start your presidency off.”

Some of Trump’s critics argued that it would be important to hold a trial even if he is already out of power in order to bar him from ever seeking office again, a penalty envisioned by the Constitution — and perhaps more important, to render a verdict condemning his actions for the sake of history.

“We’ve never had to consider even the possibility of impeaching a president twice, or in the final days of his presidency,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional scholar at the University of North Carolina who testified in Trump’s first impeachment and favors another trial. “But we’ve never had a president before who’s encouraging sedition as Trump has done in his last few days in office.”

Trump has few defenders among Republican officeholders for exhorting the crowd before it marched on the Capitol and even some in the conservative news media turned on him, most notably The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which called his actions “impeachable” and urged him to resign.

Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, told Fox News on Saturday that “the president committed impeachable offenses,” joining at least three other Senate Republicans who have called on Trump to resign, expressed openness to impeachment or voted for conviction last year.

But in the face of impeachment threats, some Republicans began taking up the fight against his opponents again. They may not like Trump or believe it is politically viable to be seen as excusing his behavior but many are still energized by battling his enemies on the left.

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Friday (8) night, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was accosted by Trump supporters at an airport for opposing the president’s efforts to overturn the election, was suddenly back to castigating Trump’s rivals and talking about Hunter Biden.

Graham focused on Trump’s video message Thursday (7) calling for healing and reconciliation, a video the president privately expressed regret for making. “Instead of trying to match what President Trump has done, the radical Democrats are talking about another impeachment that will destroy the country even further,” Graham said.

Still, Trump might have a challenge finding lawyers to defend him in any trial. Jay Sekulow, who was a leader of the defence team in the impeachment trial last year, called the idea of a second impeachment a “gigantic mistake” by Democrats during a radio show, but has not participated in Trump’s legal efforts to overturn Biden’s election and did not respond to a message asking if he would represent the president again. Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who teamed up with Sekulow, has been so upset about the Capitol attack that he has considered resigning.

One of the few members of his defence team who said he would stick with the president was Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School emeritus professor who had a secondary role last time. In an email Saturday, he said he would defend Trump on free expression grounds.

“Trump’s speech, whatever one may think of it on the merits, is clearly protected by the First Amendment,” he said. “To impeach him for a constitutionally protected speech would violate both the First Amendment and the constitutional criteria for impeachment and would do enduring damage to the Constitution.”

-New York Times