Today, Explained - The nine impeachment scenarios

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

President Pence? President Pelosi? There are nearly a dozen ways the impeachment inquiry could end. Vox’s Laura McGann runs through each of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Laura McGann, politics editor here at Vox. I was wondering if you could help me with some scenarios. Sure. So I think we all know how this impeachment story begins. Press reports began to break of a phone call by the president of the United States calling upon a foreign power to intervene in his election. This is a breach of his constitutional responsibilities. But I'm wondering, as I think many people out there might be,

how it could end. How many scenarios would you say we even have here? Okay, get ready for it. I gave this some thought, and we're looking at nine. Nine scenarios. Yes, yes. Oh my gosh. Well, so I guess to go through them all, we should start with no impeachment at all. Is that scenario one? Yes, let's start there. So scenario one is in the House where they're holding their inquiry into Donald Trump, they decide, you know what, we're not going to hold a vote. We're not

going to vote to impeach him. And things go back to what passed for normal in our current age of American politics. Is that a real possibility here after this point, after Nancy Pelosi was sort of pressured into going this route in the first place? I think this looks pretty unlikely at this point because Democrats have gotten on board behind the inquiry. There's been a lot of call on the 2020 campaign trail for his impeachment. And at the same time, public opinion is shifting towards impeachment. So it seems unlikely at this stage that Democrats would just not hold a vote. Okay. So scenario one, no impeachment whatsoever, looking unlikely at this point. Scenario two, I imagine, must follow impeachment and then a whole litany of options after that, right? Right. So scenario two is the House says, okay, we're going to hold a vote. And whether it's

party line or not, that Democrats have enough votes in the House to send this issue on to the Senate. And that's where we hit our next path in the road. And what is that path? We know that Senator Mitch McConnell has said he will definitely take up impeachment after the House votes. There was a little bit of a question about that, of would he, wouldn't he? Does he have to? does he not? And he has said, If it were to happen, the Senate has no choice. If the House were to act, the Senate immediately goes into a trial.

But the question is what that will look like. So he can hold a robust trial in the Senate. He could hold a quick trial that is not very robust or something in between. And each of those scenarios could have various outcomes. What does a quick trial look like? Mitch McConnell brings it up. Maybe it's a day, maybe it's two days. They go over the evidence and Republicans, Democrats vote along a party line and Trump

is off the hook. No impeachment. OK. And is a long trial more of like an earnest inquiry here? Yeah. So if Mitch McConnell thought, you know what, let's do the full thing, you know, I don't want to be accused of not giving this its full airing or its, you know, fair showing, which seems a little unlikely that he would want to do this, but he could very well say, let's do let's really go for it and call witnesses and really make the Senate kind of like a courtroom and run a whole trial.

They could. And at the end of that, you could have a couple of different outcomes. You know, there could be a party line to vote again. be at this stage some more vulnerable Senate Republicans who feel under pressure to convict Trump just because of the nature of the inquiry and the facts that come out. I mean, they're put in a bit of a harder spot. Or you could have, you know, a situation where Republicans really break and decide, yeah, we're going to vote to convict and we're going to remove him. That's the kind of the third option of what could happen. That's the big one. That is the big one. That's the big eight. And I'm guessing that option leads to many options as well. Oh, yes. So this big option, it would require 67 senators to agree to impeach Donald Trump.

Republicans control the Senate narrowly, so it would be a big swing. It would take a lot of Republicans to say, you know what, we're going to vote to convict. What happens if some Republicans presumably join a whole lot of Democrats and vote to convict the president in the Senate after the House impeaches? OK, so at that point, Donald Trump would be ousted. And so the question would become, okay, well, who takes his place? And that's where things get really weird. So the obvious answer would be, okay, the vice president steps in, Mike Pence. If you remember when Richard Nixon was pressured out of office,

he actually wasn't impeached. He was pressured out. He had this vice president, Gerald Ford, sitting there who sort of weirdly was completely disconnected from his administration because of a whole other scandal that was going on at the time. But it allowed Republicans to just have a placeholder in there who was not affiliated with the scandal. Mr. Vice President, are you prepared to take the oath of office as president of the United States? I am, sir. Does Pence get the whole inauguration thing? Does he get the ceremony or does it happen in some back room? He puts his hand on a Bible and it's done. Well, one of the problems here is that,

unlike Gerald Ford, Mike Pence is now implicated in the scandal that would have theoretically undone Trump. Right. So Mike Pence usually lays pretty low in the White House and is not caught up in kind of the scandals of the day. But as it turns out, he was involved in the pressure campaign to get the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. The president spoke about lack of European support. He spoke about corruption. And he tasked me to go and to meet with the president of Ukraine and carry our concerns about those issues. And anyone that looks at the president's transcript will see that the president was raising issues that were appropriate, that were genuine interest to the American people. He actually had a conversation with the Ukrainian president where he talked about foreign aid that had been suspended by the U.S. to Ukraine. And he talked about corruption. And he sort of kind of had this conversation where he said,

we'll get you the money back if you do this for us. So in some ways, he is even more explicitly involved in a quid pro quo with Ukraine than even the call notes of Donald Trump's call with the president of Ukraine show. So he's tied up in this. He is not he is not outside of the scandal, but really in the center of it. So in the highly unlikely scenario that Republicans join Democrats and convict President Trump and he's booted from office and Mike Pence is implicated too and thus can't be president. What are we talking here? All right. Hold on to your hat, Sean.

We are talking about President Pelosi. Yes. Next in line would be Nancy Pelosi. Does she even want it? I thought she's happy as speaking. I mean, maybe this is like her. Maybe this has all been just a Nancy Pelosi galaxy

brain. The entire Trump administration, it was all building towards President Nancy Pelosi. But we don't get to just end there as much as I'm sure some people would love the story to end there. Unfortunately for Nancy Pelosi, the law that sort of puts her in place next in line, the Presidential Succession Act, has always had some looming questions over it that have never really been tested. And the issue is basically that there are some legal scholars who think that putting the Speaker of the House or the Senate President

pro temp, who is Chuck Grassley, that they don't qualify under the language of the act. So before Nancy Pelosi became President Pelosi, there would likely be a challenge and likely that challenge would end up in front of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is now controlled by conservatives. And so there's a very good chance that we would see an outcome in which President Pelosi gets to go back to being Speaker of the House Pelosi, but not President Pelosi. Does George W. Bush become president again if it goes to the Supreme Court? No, there will be no Floridian influence here or anything like that. But next in line is the Secretary of State.

Pompeo? Yes, but we run into another problem. Right. So Secretary of State Pompeo is also implicated in the Ukraine scandal, possibly even more so than Mike Pence. For those of you who rightly are living your lives every day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the infamous call listening in when Donald Trump tried to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating Joe Biden. And he was subsequently involved in what I would call a cover-up of the call. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Trump pressed the president of Ukraine

eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani to investigate Joe Biden's son. What do you know about those conversations? So you just gave me a report about a high-seek whistleblower campaign, none of which I've seen. He was explicitly asked about it and sort of played dumb. It turns out he's been involved in other ways and in contact with Rudy Giuliani. And so he is very the sort of trappings of the State Department to help Donald Trump out in all of this, which is arguably worse, possibly, than Pence doing one weird conversation. It's hard to say. And then who's president?

So get ready, America, for President Steve Mnuchin. The Treasury Secretary. That's right. Oh, no. The President Steve Mnuchin. The Treasury Secretary. That's right. Oh, no, the guy who made the Lego movie. Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you're part of a team. Everything is awesome. Yes, yes, he definitely made the Lego movie.

He was this underwhelming choice for Secretary of the Treasury. However, appears to have no connection to pressuring international leaders into looking into conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. So, therefore qualified to be our president. Okay, Laura, I was counting that whole time. So we've got no impeachment whatsoever. We've got the House impeaches, but the Republican Senate does not. We've got the House impeaches and the Republican Senate convicts

with Mike Pence becoming president, with Nancy Pelosi becoming president, with Pompeo becoming president, with Mnuchin becoming president. But there is one more option here, right? There is. And it's kind of like the funniest, most absurd of them all. So there is a certain irony to it because Donald Trump is kind of being accused of bullying or strong arming the president of Ukraine. And another option would be for Republicans to kind of bully and strong arm Donald Trump behind the scenes and get him to resign. That's what Republicans did with

Richard Nixon. I think we've arrived at a point where both the national interest and his own interest will best be served by resigning. It's not just his enemies who feel that way. Many of his best friends, and I consider myself one of them, believe now that this would be the most appropriate course. So the last option scenario on the table here is that President Donald Trump resigns. Yep, that he just quits. Which seems the least likely of them all. You know, we haven't seen him show any other acts of humility in his long career in public life.

So it seems pretty unlikely this time around. But who knows? You never know. More likely to me seems like the Senate could convict Donald Trump. He'd be booted out of office, but then he would just try to run again in 2020. Is that a possibility? So if Donald Trump is impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate, he can, of course, run again in 2020. If he's convicted by the Senate and removed from office, strap in because this is just an unprecedented moment. We don't know what kind of legal challenge there would be if he tried to run again. I mean, from a political standpoint, the only way he would be ousted is if public opinion had turned against him

so hard that Republicans just thought we have to get rid of this guy. But, you know, could he theoretically mount a campaign? I mean, it seems like the answer should be no if he's been removed from office, but it's never been tested in American history. So we don't know how it might play out. So am I wrong in thinking that the most likely scenario here is that the Democrats vote to impeach, the Republicans do a perfunctory trial, and Donald Trump never gets convicted? I think if you had to ask me, you know, what would happen today, I think that that is what would happen. But they're not moving forward today.

And what we've seen happen is public opinion sort of shifting in favor of impeachment. So if more comes out that's damaging to Trump and public opinion continues to shift, we don't know. I am not so bullish that the only outcome here is that Donald Trump skates away. Lauren McGann, politics editor at Vox.com. Thank you so much for running through wild scenarios with me. Oh, sure. You're welcome, Sean.