Democratic Senate leader calls for removal of Trump from office

Steph Deschamps / January 7, 2021

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday urged Vice President Mike Pence to remove Donald Trump from office after violence perpetrated by his supporters on Capitol Hill, the seat of the US Congress.

What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday was an insurgency against the United States, instigated by the president, wrote Chuck Schumer, calling on Republican Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Constitutional Amendment which authorizes the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare the president unfit to exercise his functions, and to remove him from power.

If the vice president and cabinet refuse to do so, Congress should come together to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president, added Chuck Schumer.

This president should not stay in office one more day, he insisted.

According to some American media, ministers of the Republican billionaire discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th amendment to the Constitution as early as Wednesday evening.

If many Democratic voices were quickly raised to demand that Donald Trump be removed from his functions, by this amendment or through an impeachment procedure, the Republicans were rare to do so.

But an elected member of the House of Representatives, already critical of Donald Trump, Adam Kinzinger, also called on Thursday to follow this path unprecedented in American history.

It is with a heavy heart that I call for the 25th Amendment to be invoked for the sake of our democracy, he tweeted, accusing the Republican billionaire of stoking the embers of violence.

Donald Trump has not spoken since the broadcast of a short video in which he called on Wednesday the demonstrators, who had forced the entry of the Capitol during a session of Congress, to return home but where he also declared without evidence that the election had been stolen.

In a brief statement, he has since committed simply to an orderly transfer of power, reaffirming his complete disagreement with the outcome.