After four hours of arguments from House impeachment managers and former U.S. President Donald Trump's attorneys, the Senate voted 56-44 Tuesday to proclaim that it is constitutional to hold on trial a president who is no longer in office, The Guardian reported Wednesday.
The Senate vote clears the way for several days of disputes over whether Trump should be convicted for inciting the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Trump is the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice.
House impeachment managers kicked off their opening arguments by playing a video showing the violence on the Capitol.
In the video, Trump loyalists could be seen barging into the Capitol. It also included quotes from Trump's speech: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," he said moments before the riots.
Six Republican legislators joined all 50 Democratic senators in the vote to move forward with the impeachment trial. But it also served as a manifestation of the former commander in chief's expected acquittal, since the votes of 17 Republican senators are required along with the Democrats to convict Trump.
While six Republicans joined their Democrat counterparts to proceed with the trial, the tally showed the amount of legal wrangling the prosecutors must put up with for a decisive conviction, which requires a two-thirds threshold of 67 senators.
A number of conservative legal luminaries have publicly contended that impeaching a former president is indeed against the law.
The Democratic House managers who are tasked with prosecuting the case against Trump focused on one critical point: that if the Senate rules that a former president cannot be impeached for actions he/she commits while president, then that gives them the freedom to do whatever they want in their final days in office, senior political analyst Jon Ward said.
Trump's impeachment trial will resume on Wednesday, when the Democratic executives will have eight hours to present their case for convicting the former American president.
