Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (Yahoo, 11/4/26): “I haven’t had a single member of the House Democratic Caucus talk to me about impeachment.”

In media analysis of what Democrats might do in the wake of the Blue Tsunami, one don’t is consistent: The party should not use its recapture of both chambers of Congress to impeach President Donald Trump for a third time.

“Many Democrats have cautioned against impeaching Trump, who was impeached twice during his first term,” MassLive (Yahoo News,  11/4/26) reported. “While speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Rep. [Hakeem] Jeffries emphasized that Democrats are focused on making the country more affordable for Americans.”

“There’s an active debate among Democrats about whether impeachment is a good idea,” the BBC (11/4/26) noted, before going on to explain why it was a bad idea:

The first impeachment, in 2019, unleashed partisan rancor and allowed Trump to cast himself later as a victim of political persecution, which later helped build support for his second White House run.

This one-sided examination of the merits of impeachment was typical. After quoting Jeffries saying in September that Democrats hadn’t “ruled anything in and we haven’t ruled anything out in terms of impeachment,” U.S. News (11/4/26) quoted a voice in favor of ruling out:

“I can’t speak for everybody else, but I would not support an impeachment of Trump,” Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who won his race for the Senate last night, told the Columbus Dispatch. “There’s simply no reason for that, no matter what happens in the midterms.”

‘Consumed with retaliation and retribution’

Kansas’s Adam Hamilton (Newsweek, 11/8/26) told voters he’s “not going to Washington to hold trials.”

In a Newsweek profile (11/8/26) of Adam Hamilton, the senator-elect from Kansas “expressed little enthusiasm for a third impeachment of Trump,” saying “I’m not as interested in impeachment as setting up guardrails…. I don’t want to see us spend the next two years dividing our country further.”

Inexplicably, Newsweek turned for comment on this perspective to former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who perhaps more than any senator prevented Democrats from holding Trump accountable when the party last controlled the chamber:

“If they start with investigations, Michael, it’s over,” Manchin, who was a Democrat before becoming an independent, told CNN host Michael Smerconish last month. “They’re going to tee up everything in 2028 for a Republican takeover completely.”

Manchin urged Democrats to concentrate on legislation aimed at reducing Americans’ cost of living rather than becoming “consumed with retaliation and retribution,” arguing that an investigations-first approach could ultimately return Republicans to power in 2028.

Even an opinion column sympathetic to the idea of impeachment spent more time enumerating the downsides. After saying that what Trump “seems most worried about right now is potential impeachment,” Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian (11/11/26) cited voices from center and left telling him not to worry:

Attempting to remove Trump would be a grueling process that many don’t have the appetite for. Kamala Harris said recently: “Going in the direction of impeachment is not a good idea…. We have limited resources and I think the energy and the resources need to be put into accountability, need to be put into investigations.”

In an interview with NBC News on Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders went even further. “We cannot spend all of our time investigating Trump,” Sanders said. “We have to stand up for working-class families, make a real difference in their lives.”

In rebuttal, Mahdawi offers only, “Hear me out: How about we do both?”

The Constitution isn’t self-enforcing

James Madison believed that any president who used the pardon power to protect cronies would surely be impeached.

You’d be hard-pressed to get any sense from media analysis of the real argument in favor of impeachment, which is that this is the only conceivable way to hold Trump accountable.

The Constitution is not self-enforcing. It forbids, for example, presidents from receiving emoluments—that is, profits of any kind—from foreign states. It’s a prohibition Trump has made a mockery of (American Constitution Society, 10/1/19; Executive Functions, 5/15/25). But there’s no penalty attached to the violation of this stricture, which makes it, without impeachment, more of an emoluments suggestion.

Trump cannot be held accountable by the voters; having been elected twice, he’s ineligible to run again anyway, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary (AP, 3/31/25). The prospect of bringing Trump to justice after he leaves office was essentially foreclosed by the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States (2024), in which Chief Justice John Roberts recklessly ruled that “Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the president’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority.” (Roberts granted the president “absolute immunity” when “exercising his core constitutional powers,” and at least a “presumptive” immunity for “all official acts”—a presumption only surmountable in the unlikely event that there are “no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the executive branch.”)

This leaves impeachment as the sole means of asserting that the Constitution means what it says. And impeachment was always envisioned as playing that role; when Constitutional Convention delegate George Mason objected, “The president ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself,” James Madison assured him:

If the president be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him.

A comprehensive approach

Steve Cohen will not be able to reintroduce his articles of impeachment in the 120th Congress, having been redistricted out of office by Tennessee Republicans.

One might ask: If being impeached twice didn’t hold the president accountable, what good would impeaching him again do? But the first impeachment, in the ineffable political wisdom of Nancy Pelosi, focused very narrowly on Trump’s arm-twisting of the Ukrainian government, ignoring the vast majority of his abuses of power (and their impact on the American people). The second impeachment was an emergency effort to head off an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

What’s needed is an impeachment that addresses all of Trump’s federal crimes and violations of his oath—to detail exactly what he has done that no president should be allowed to do. Fortunately, we have a model for just such a comprehensive approach in the articles of impeachment introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, on September 24, 2026. The 26 articles are as follows:

• Article I: Undermining Democracy—Sowing Doubt in Elections
• Article II: Abuse of Power—Waging War on Iran Without Congressional Approval
• Article III: Abuse of Power—Extrajudicial Killings in International Waters of Venezuela
• Article IV: Abuse of Power—Deploying Military Forces Against United States Cities
• Article V: Violation of Oath—The Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
• Article VI: Abuse of Power—Canceling Federal Grants to Punish States for Their Votes
• Article VII: Abuse of Power—Imposing Loyalty Tests on the Federal Workforce
• Article VIII: Disregard of Courts—the Alien Enemies Act and the Case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
• Article IX: Violation of Oath—Cruel and Unusual Punishment at CECOT
• Article X: Violation of Oath—Unlawful Withholding of Appropriated Funds and Dismantling of Congressionally Established Programs
• Article XI: Abuse of Power—Obstructing the Lawful Appointment of United States Attorneys
• Article XII: Abuse of Power—Defying Court Orders in Immigration Enforcement
• Article XIII: Abolishing a Congressionally Mandated Agency—the Department of Education
• Article XIV: Violation of Oath—Unlawful Mass Termination of Inspectors General Without Statutory Notice to Congress
• Article XV: Unlawfully and Unilaterally Taxing United States Citizens Through Emergency Powers Tariffs
• Article XVI: Abuse of Power—Political Prosecutions of Comey, James and Schiff
• Article XVII: Abuse of Power—The IRS Settlement and the Corruption of the Judgment Fund
• Article XVIII: Abuse of Power—The Corrupt Use of the Pardon Power
• Article XIX: Attacks on a Free Press—Banishing Reporters From the White House for Disfavored Coverage
• Article XX: Attacks on a Free Press—Coercing CBS and ABC to Change Editorial Content
• Article XXI: Violation of Oath—Free Speech and Retaliatory Executive Orders Against Law Firms
• Article XXII: Violation of Oath—Free Speech and Coercing Universities Through Withheld Federal Funds
• Article XXIII: Abuse of Power—Demolishing the White House East Wing Without Congressional Approval
• Article XXIV: Violation of Oath—the Illegal Impoundment of Appropriated Funds
• Article XXV: Abuse of Power—Self-Aggrandizement Through the Renaming of Public Institutions, Seizure of Cultural and Civic Property, and Personal Appropriation of National Currency
• Article XXVI: Emoluments Violations—Profiting Personally and Directly From the Presidency

Reading over the particulars is a reminder of just how systematic Trump’s assault on democracy has been. If the 120th Congress does not make an effort to hold him accountable for these abuses, you can be sure that a future president will use this as a to-do list.

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