The Reality Of A Third Trump Impeachment— An Absolute Necessity for Our Country's Stability

The other day, the NY Times published a column by Thomas Edsall, Could the Third Time Be the Charm on Impeachment and Removal?. In the not too distant future we may all be asking ourselves if we would voie for a congressional candidate not advocating for impeachment as part of their campaign.

Mark Pinsley, Lehigh County controller and a likely candidate for Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, shared some thoughts on a third Trump impeachment, which— spoiler alert— he’s all for it. “Should Donald Trump be impeached for a third time? Yes. Even if conviction is politically impossible, the process matters. It is the only constitutional tool for directly challenging presidential misconduct. And Trump's second term has already delivered a staggering list of abuses: deploying Marines domestically in Los Angeles, revoking university funding for political reasons, and profiting off cryptocurrency deals while in office. These are not policy disputes. They are attacks on the Constitution itself.

However, there is a deeper, more potent avenue for accountability that has not been explored, and it begins not in Washington but in Colorado.

In December 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in Anderson v. Griswold that Donald Trump had “engaged in insurrection” and was disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The United States Supreme Court later reversed the decision, but crucially, it did not overturn the Colorado court's factual finding that Trump engaged in insurrection. Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states lack the power to enforce Section 3 against federal candidates. The ruling was jurisdictional, not factual. 

In the eyes of Colorado law, Trump remains an adjudicated insurrectionist.

Section 3 is a post-Civil War clause in the U.S. Constitution. It bars any person from holding federal or state office if they:

“…have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” after having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution.

Originally designed to prevent former Confederates from re-entering government, Section 3 remains in force. It is not symbolic. It is the law. And for the first time in over 150 years, a court applied it to a former president.

This matters. Although Trump remains in office, he does so in direct defiance of Colorado's standing judicial determination that he is constitutionally disqualified. 

Colorado's Attorney General, Governor, or another brave state elected official should take the next step: challenge the legal authority of Trump's presidency within the boundaries of Colorado. This doesn't necessarily mean suing a federal agency. It means finding the right case, one that tests the conflict between the state's constitutional integrity and Trump's claimed authority.

There are several options, but two stand out:

1. University Funding Retaliation: If the Trump administration attempts to cut federal grants to public universities in Colorado, especially on ideological grounds (e.g., alleging lack of “patriotic instruction” or support for pro-democracy causes), Colorado could challenge those conditions as unconstitutional. The state would not be rejecting the funding but asserting that conditions set by a disqualified executive are legally void within Colorado.

2. Immigration Enforcement Demands: If the Trump administration attempts to force state or local law enforcement to comply with ICE detainer requests or participate in enforcement actions beyond their authority, Colorado could argue that compliance would violate both state law and constitutional obligations, given the adjudicated disqualification of the person issuing those orders.

These kinds of legal actions wouldn't harm Coloradans. They would protect the state's autonomy while inviting courts to confront the contradiction at the heart of the current constitutional crisis: How can a man found to have engaged in insurrection still command the machinery of the federal government?

This action would reopen the Section 3 debate in federal court from a new angle, one grounded in state sovereignty and existing judicial findings. It forces the judiciary to grapple with a fundamental question: Are the constitutional rules governing who can be president actual legal constraints, or are they merely optional?

Because no other state has gone this far, no other jurisdiction has held a trial, weighed the facts, and concluded that Trump engaged in insurrection. That gives Colorado a uniquely powerful foundation for legal action. And any state court would have to uphold the fact that he engaged in insurrection since their State Supreme Court had that finding. And its leaders, Governor Jared Polis and Attorney General Phil Weiser, both Democrats, have the institutional credibility and constitutional tools to act.

The specific strategy, whether targeting funding conditions, enforcement cooperation, or another area, must be carefully chosen. That choice must rest with a brave Coloradan official willing to defend their state's legal and moral integrity.

Make no mistake: impeachment should still be pursued. Not because it will succeed in removing Trump, but because not trying would normalize impunity. But litigation in Colorado could do something impeachment cannot: force the federal judiciary to confront a factual finding it has tried to sidestep.

Pinsley concluded that the Colorado litigation “could reintroduce the Section 3 debate in a court of law, with standing, with facts, and with a state's dignity at stake. This path is narrow. It is uphill. But it is real. And unlike another doomed impeachment vote, it has the potential to change the legal record, not just the historical one.”

Travis Terrell, the Iowa  progressive taking on Trump ally, Mariannette Miller-Meeks also sees impeachment as something worth pursuing. “Trump,’ he wrote, “doesn’t just disregard democracy. He’s actively dismantling it. In his second term, free from any accountability to voters, he has gone full authoritarian. He’s illegally seizing funds Congress approved. He’s unleashing the military on civilians. He’s profiting off the presidency like a mob boss. He pardoned violent insurrectionists who tried to overturn an election. This isn’t incompetence— it’s calculated; it’s corrupt; and it’s dangerous. Trump has our democracy hanging by a thread and is constantly reaching for the scissors. If none of this injustice bothers Republicans enough to vote for impeachment, maybe they should at least focus on the fact that his mental state is rotting just as fast as Biden’s. And if Republicans ever want to get back to the days when their party wasn’t handcuffed to a dictator, they need to act now— before there’s nothing left to save.”

Edsall pointed out that “We now have a president imposing an agenda far more dangerous than anything Richard Nixon dreamed of… In the five months Trump has held office in his second term, the number of impeachable offenses legal scholars estimate that he has already committed ranges from three to eight or more. This is not to say Trump will be impeached. The current Republican-controlled House is far too subservient to even consider it. In pursuit of his agenda, Trump has sacrificed due process, gutted congressional authority, politicized the administration of justice and run roughshod over the First Amendment.”

Edsall asked Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina who has often appeared as an expert witness at congressional hearings on impeachment, about Trump. Gerhardt replied by email:

“It is nearly impossible to overstate the degree of Trump’s corruption. It is manifest every day, as if he is daring the American people and Congress to try to stop him. Trump has shown time and again his disdain for the rule of law, including for the Constitution of the United States. He has routinely violated his oath of office and even proclaimed himself as entitled to break the law to save the country.”

Gerhardt like virtually every other historian declared that no other president, “has come anywhere close to Trump’s corruption, and the level of his corruption— on a daily basis— is unmatched in our history… “He has committed more impeachable offenses in the first few months of his second term than all previous presidents combined. They include lying to the American people on numerous matters and violating the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process for both citizens and noncitizens, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the emoluments clause, numerous abuses of power, including the pardon power, complicity in eroding public health protections and violating federal laws governing civil service and many other matters.”

And “Gerhardt,” wrote Edsall, “is by no means alone in his assessment. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, replied by email to my inquiries, listing five grounds for Trump’s impeachment:

Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.

President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.

The impoundment of funds— cutting off funds appropriated by Congress in a myriad of programs, including for scientific research, for international aid, for colleges and universities, for agencies created by Congress— is unconstitutional and illegal. It is unconstitutional because it is usurping Congress’s spending power, and it is illegal because it violates the Impoundment Control Act. This is a very serious abuse of power causing great harm.

President Trump is using the military for domestic law enforcement in Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and a long tradition against such use of the military within the United States. This is a very frightening abuse of power.

It is clear that he is personally profiting from being president, with his cryptocurrency profiteering and his accepting an airplane as a personal gift and his real estate deals. This violates the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.

[These actions] show a president who has no regard for the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our country has never seen anything like this. So yes, there is a constitutional basis for the House to impeach and the Senate to remove him from office.

All of the legal experts Edsall consulted said Trump has created an impeachable record and he concluded that “As a practical matter, Democrats are slightly favored to retake control of the House in 2026. If they do, they would have the votes to impeach Trump, and it is quite possible that they will do just that. Winning a Senate conviction of Trump on House-approved impeachment charges, which requires 67 senators, would be a much tougher hill to climb, possible only if Trump suffers debilitating political setbacks over the next three years. A failure to achieve a Senate conviction does not, however, guarantee that Trump gets off the hook. A number of the impeachable offenses cited above would justify criminal inquiries, especially Trump’s cryptocurrency profiteering. The president’s ventures into digital currency clearly fall outside the standard of “official acts” that the Supreme Court exempted from criminal prosecution in its 2024 decision, Trump v United States. So the man who once boasted ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters’ may one day get his comeuppance. There is no guarantee that will happen, of course, but it may turn out that some sense of justice has survived Trump’s multipronged assault on our legal system. If Trump does go scot-free, untouched by either a third impeachment or criminal prosecution, it will be an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Even so, if he is allowed to retire peacefully to enjoy his cryptocurrency wealth, his presidency will still go down in history as the embodiment of injustice, malfeasance, cruelty and transgression.”