USAnons,
can they impeach only active POTUS, or by the law they can impeach TRUMP even now, after he have left office?
The Constitution’s Option for Impeachment After a President Leaves Office
The principal argument against allowing post-presidential impeachment is that the Constitution does not make private citizens subject to impeachment. The founders rejected the British model that allowed Parliament to impeach anyone, except for the King, and so they limited impeachment to certain public officials, including presidents. Subjecting a president to impeachment after he has returned to his private life would, seemingly according to this logic, violate this basic constitutional principle. (Indeed, the Constitution itself applies only to governmental not private action.)
The problem with this argument, however, is that presidents and the other officials who are subject to impeachment are not like the rest of us. Once they leave office and return to their private lives, they are still ex-presidents and former officials who may have committed impeachable offenses in office. A core principle of the Constitution is that no one, not even the president, is above the law, and an abuse of power, by definition, is a violation of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. What’s more, the special penalties upon conviction in impeachment are designed to protect the republic from the very type of people who have abused public office in such a grave manner that they should never have the opportunity to be entrusted with public power again. It would make no sense for former officials, or ones who step down just in time, to escape that remedial mechanism. It should accordingly go without saying that if an impeachment begins when an individual is in office, the process may surely continue after they resign or otherwise depart.
Understandably, members of Congress and the American people might lose the appetite for subjecting a president to impeachment once he has left office for good. But that is a political choice not a constitutional directive. A president who leaves office and retains the potential to return someday should still be subject as well to the unique processes set forth in the Constitution to sanction his abuse of his office. To haul a former president back before the tribunal of Congress when it has uncovered misconduct makes eminent sense when the only permissible sanctions might be those that the Constitution provides. That misconduct invariably calls for a special remedy, and the Constitution provides that in disabling the president who has committed such misconduct of ever being able again to serve as president or any other federal office and continuing to benefit financially from his time as president. Presidents are not above the law, not when they are in office, and not when they leave office. That kind of accountability comes with the job, a job Donald Trump seems to want so badly that he’s breaking the Constitution to try to keep it.
https://www.justsecurity.org/74107/the-constitutions-option-for-impeachment-after-a-president-leaves-office/