By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
United States Senator Roy Blunt asserts the effort to impeach former President Donald Trump is unconstitutional.
Blunt was one of the 45 Republican senators who voted for a measure declaring the House effort to impeach Trump fell outside of its constitutional powers.
“Well, I think the purpose for presidential impeachment in the Constitution is to remove a president from office,” Blunt tells St. Joseph Post. “I don’t think the purpose in the Constitution is to punish a person after they’ve left office.”
Five Republicans joined the 50 Democrats in the U.S. Senate to defeat the measure, but it provided a sure sign that the votes aren’t there to convict Trump of inciting violence against the United States government in his speech prior to the January 6th Capitol riot.
Blunt says impeachment was never meant to go after a private citizen, which Trump now is.
“I just think the snap impeachment by the House of Representatives was a big mistake on their part and at the end of the next couple of weeks it will be clear I think that they never had a chance to impeach the president, because he’d already left office,” Blunt says.
Though the Republican senators failed in their effort to declare the impeachment process unconstitutional, the vote is a clear signal the Senate will not convict Trump.
Though Blunt believes the process is unconstitutional, he remains critical of the speech given by Trump from the White House January 6th.
“I’d characterize the speech as reckless,” Blunt says. “The day of the speech when ask did I want to hear anything more from the president that day, I said no, the president’s responsible for a lot of what happened today by his behavior and it was a terrible day for America, but that doesn’t mean it’s impeachable.”