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The presumptive Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office.
“What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday was an insurgency against the United States, instigated by the president,” Schumer, DN.Y., said Thursday in a statement. “This president should not be in office one more day.”
Schumer joins a growing contingent of lawmakers from both sides in calling for Trump’s impeachment, either by using the 25th Amendment or by impeachment.
“The fastest and most efficient way – it can be done today – to remove this president from office would be for the vice president to invoke the 25th Amendment immediately,” Schumer said. “If the vice president and the cabinet refuse to stand, Congress should meet again to remove the president,” he added.
Under a provision of the 25th Amendment, the vice president can, with the support of the majority of the presidential cabinet, invoke the measure and declare Trump unfit for office, which could lead to his early impeachment. In such a scenario, the vice president would immediately take over as interim president.
The attack on Capitol Hill came after Trump spoke to the crowd, encouraging them to walk towards the building and saying, “You will never take back our country with weakness, you have to be strong and you have to be strong.”
Earlier Thursday, Representative Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Called on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, becoming the first Republican to do so.
In an interview with MSNBC, Kinzinger criticized Trump as being “unmoored, not just from his duty, or even from his oath, but from reality itself” and said that Pence, and the rest of Trump’s cabinet , were to invoke the measure “to end this nightmare.”
“The president is unfit and the president is not well. And the president must now relinquish control of the executive voluntarily or unintentionally, ”he said.
Several sources familiar with the matter told NBC News on Wednesday night that there had been informal discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment among Trump administration staff.
It is not known whether Cabinet officials discussed the matter; two sources said the issue was not addressed with Pence, who is expected to agree with a Cabinet majority to empower the vice president under the 25th Amendment.
The conversations were fueled in part by concerns about unrest and insurgency across the United States over the next two weeks, before President-elect Joe Biden was sworn in as president on the 20th.
Prominent members of both parties, however, have also warned against such sweeping action – albeit for vastly different reasons.
Brian Fallon, executive director of the Supreme Court’s progressive reform group Demand Justice, who served as Hillary Clinton’s press secretary during the 2016 campaign, tweeted that invoking the 25th Amendment would just be ” loophole “for Republicans, whom he accused of failing to hold Trump. responsible themselves.
Meanwhile, John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for nearly 18 months in 2018 and 2019, said invoking the measure would further increase tensions in the United States.
“I recognize that it is dangerous, but I repeat, we have to keep in mind the adage ‘do no harm’ because you can make things worse if we are not careful,” he said. Wednesday on CNN.
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