Trump and Vance.
Both, in the same effort. The Vice President is not along for the ride — he holds the only office that can begin a Twenty-Fifth Amendment proceeding, and has not begun one. Nine House Republicans can start this, four percent of their own conference. Nobody has put the question to them. The Democrats could. If not them, the people who are about to vote.
There is a war on in Iran that Congress never declared and the House has now voted three times to end — in June, in July, and again on September 15, that last time with seven Republicans joining. Nothing happened any of the three times, because a concurrent resolution takes both chambers and the Senate has not acted. Diesel set a record at $6.23 a gallon on September 14, up about sixty-nine percent since February, and diesel is in the price of every grocery in the country. The election is in seven weeks. The people who would have to answer for any of it are not in the building.
Those nine cannot do it today. The House left town on September 16 and is not due back until November 9, and nothing gets voted on while they are gone. Calling the question is the parliamentary name for forcing a vote instead of talking a thing to death — it is what this site is named for and what those nine would be doing — and it takes a floor that is open. There is not one.
Removing Mike Johnson from the Speaker's chair, on the way to removing Donald Trump and JD Vance from theirs. Both of those, in the same effort, because taking the President alone hands the office to the Vice President. Nine Republicans can start it on any day the House sits.
It is not a replacement for the election and it does not wait for one. November 3 happens while this is running. That overlap is the whole point. A member who has to answer for this in October answers differently than one who answers in February, when it is over and nothing is at stake.
Why nothing can be voted on right now — three reasons, none of them about the argument
Nine members of his own party can remove him. That only works on a day the House meets.
Under the rules this House wrote for itself, a motion to remove the Speaker jumps the queue as soon as a majority-party member offers it with eight majority-party cosponsors. It cannot be buried in a committee and the chair cannot ignore it. Nine of them can do it on any day the House sits, and a simple majority of whoever shows up decides it.
A House in session is a House where that is true every single day. A House that is not in session is a House where it is true on no day at all. The same goes for everything above it — articles of impeachment jump the queue too, and so does a ripened discharge petition. All of it needs a room with people in it.
The chamber is not sealed shut, and the honest version of this is sharper than the easy one. The House gavels in every few days — September 17 and September 21 among them — for pro forma sessions that run a minute and take no votes. Those still count as legislative days. The discharge clocks run on them, and a petition can be signed at the rostrum at any of them. Nothing here is frozen by rule. It is frozen by absence, and absence is a decision somebody made.
Asked whether cancelling Thursday's votes was about avoiding the vote on the Secretary of Defense, the Speaker called the suggestion “ridiculous,” and added: “It's a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention. It will immediately be tabled, of course.”
Both halves are on the record, and the second half is the one to keep. If the vote was certain to be tabled, holding it cost him nothing. Readers can do that arithmetic without help, and this page does not need to assign anybody a motive to make its point. The rules work the same way whatever the reason was.
What opens it back up, and who actually decides. He can hold this through November 9 and past it. He cannot hold it past December 11. On September 2 the President signed a stopgap funding the government to that date, and an administration running a war in Iran cannot let the money lapse.
So the decision to open the floor is not the Speaker's. It runs through the President, and it means the President accepting a floor where his Speaker — and his own office — are exposed to business nobody in the building controls. That is the hinge, and it turns on a date neither of them picked.
Get it in writing, in public, where anyone can count it.
A promise is not a vote and carries no procedural weight at all. It carries the other kind, which is that the number is visible to everybody before the day arrives. This is the whole list of what can be built between now and November 9, and it is enough to matter.
This works whether or not anybody cooperates, which is the reason to do it this way. A member who will not answer is answering. The document that comes out of it — who committed, who refused, who never wrote back — exists either way, and it is the only document that can be built while the chamber is shut.
The first number is smaller than it sounds. Nine out of roughly two hundred and twenty is four percent. Sixteen of them are leaving outright in January, with no primary left to lose and no seat left to protect. Nine of sixteen. Every name and every margin is further down this page.
Eight things that sound like the answer.
Each of these has been suggested by somebody serious. Each one fails on a rule rather than on the politics, which means no amount of enthusiasm fixes it. The cost of spending the next seven weeks on a closed path is the seven weeks.
| The suggestion | Why it fails | What is left instead |
|---|---|---|
| “Start collecting signatures on a discharge petition now.” | This one nearly works, which is why it belongs here. Signing is done in person at the rostrum while the House is sitting, and the House is sitting — in pro forma, every few days, September 17 and September 21 among them. The rostrum is there. The members are in their districts. The Epstein petition sat at 217 signatures through a seven-week closure last autumn for exactly that reason, and took its 218th on the floor the day everyone came back. | A member who means it can fly in. Which is the question to put to any of them who says they would sign. |
| “The recess does the work for us — things ripen while they are gone.” | The clocks do run — a pro forma session is a legislative day and the discharge periods advance on it. What does not happen is anybody signing, and nothing ripens into a vote without a House that sits for real. Seven weeks of closure last autumn moved the Epstein petition by zero signatures. | Everything that needs no chamber — counts, commitments, articles written in advance. |
| “Get a majority together and force him back into session.” | There is no mechanism for it. Control of the calendar and of recognition is not reviewable and cannot be appealed. A majority that wants the House sitting has no tool to make it sit. | December 11. The money does what no majority can. |
| “Use a discharge petition to remove the Speaker.” | Wrong tool. Discharge pries a bill out of a committee sitting on it. Removing the Speaker is a separate motion, offered on the floor with nine majority-party members named on its face. There is nothing to file early and nothing to sign early. | Nine members willing to be named, in public, ahead of the day. |
| “The September 15 vote already settled this.” | Tabling disposes of that one resolution on that one day and bars nothing — and this is record, not theory. The same member has re-offered privileged impeachment articles after every tabling: 364–58 in December 2017, 355–66 in January 2018, 332–95 in July 2019, again in 2025, and 232–147 on September 15. The same articles, or better ones, can be filed the hour the House returns. | Better articles — on the war record, both offices, published before the day. |
| “Wait and let the new Congress investigate.” | The nine-member threshold is a rule this House adopted on January 3, 2025 by 215 to 209. A new Congress writes new rules in January and nobody has said this one survives. Waiting risks the tool itself, not just the timing. | This Congress, whose rules are already known. |
| “The Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” | It cannot start without the Vice President. He is one of the two officers this is about, and he is the one person whose agreement it would need. | Nothing. This one closes on its own first step. |
| “The President can call Congress back.” | He can. Article II, Section 3 gives him the power and Truman used it last, in 1948. It needs a President who wants Congress in the room. | The money again, which produces that want for a different reason. |
The House can only accuse. Sixty-seven senators decide.
Impeachment is the charge. Removal is the trial, and the Constitution makes senators the jury — that is the actual word for what they are in that room, not a figure of speech. Sixty-seven is the number. In this chamber that means twenty Republicans voting to convict. It is the hardest number in this whole proposal and nobody has ever reached it.
Here is what is available before November 3 and gone the day after. The senators on the ballot are the same people who would sit in judgment. A question put to them now is a question they answer to voters. The identical question in February is a question they answer to nobody.
So put it to them now, in public, and take whatever comes back. A senator who says they would vote to convict has said something that binds them. A senator who says they would not has also said something, and it belongs on the record beside the war, the prices, and everything else they will be asked about between now and the first Tuesday. The refusal to answer is the third answer and it is the most useful of the three, because there is no version of it that reads well.
The seats that are not in play are where this breaks or does not. Their holders know the seats are safe, which is exactly why the question has to reach them early and in public: the cost of not answering has to be made real somewhere other than a ballot.
The juror question, in the form it should be asked. If the House sends articles against the President and the Vice President, will you vote to convict, vote to acquit, or decline to say before your own election?
It takes one sentence, it has three possible answers, and every one of them is a record.
The work that does not need a floor.
None of this requires anybody’s permission, a seat in Congress, or a chamber that sits. It is what a closed House leaves available, and it is the reason the next eleven weeks are not dead time.
Put the question to your own member and publish what comes back. Will you be one of the nine? Will you sign? Will you vote on the merits instead of moving to table? The answer is a record, the refusal is a record, and the silence is a record.
Put the juror question to senators before November 3. Especially the ones whose seats are safe, because they are the least likely to be asked and the most consequential if the articles ever arrive.
Count in public. Who has committed, who has refused, who never replied. A number nobody can see changes nobody’s behaviour. A number everybody can see is the only pressure available while the chamber is shut.
Remember the room opens every few days. A member who means it can be at the rostrum at a pro forma session. That is now a question with a specific answer rather than an excuse with a general one.
Broaden it rather than narrowing it. This is not one organisation’s project and it does not improve by being owned. Anybody who wants the war ended, the prices explained, or the calendar answered for is already inside the argument whether or not they use these words.
The field has widened three times this year, and it is measurable. The House voted to end the Iran war on June 3, 215 to 208. It voted again on July 23, 214 to 208. It voted a third time on September 15, 220 to 204, with seven Republicans crossing. Nothing came of any of them, because the Senate did not act. But the direction of that count is the single most encouraging number on this page.
The election will not do this by itself and the calendar runs through January whatever happens on November 3. The question is only whether the advantage sits with the people who control the schedule or with the people who can ask questions in public every day of the eleven weeks they are gone.
The name in the slot can be swapped. The slot cannot.
This draws more objection than any other part and deserves the least of it. What the proposal needs is a profile. A name is just how you say a profile out loud.
Five moves, with the number each one takes and the way each one fails.
This is a sketch, not a finished plan, and not the only route. It is written down so it can be checked rather than believed, and so that anybody who can improve a step will have something specific to improve. Getting closer to exhaustive would be a good use of somebody's week. Treating this as exhaustive would not.
Nine majority-party members move to remove the Speaker. The motion jumps the queue, so it cannot be buried and cannot be ignored by the chair.
TAKES 9 TO OFFER · A MAJORITY OF THOSE VOTING TO CARRY
FAILS IF: fewer than nine will put their names on it. This is the binding constraint and the one nobody has tested at this altitude.
The House elects a Speaker — the caretaker profile above, bound by a published pledge not to run in 2028.
TAKES A MAJORITY OF THOSE VOTING
FAILS IF: the conference installs its own successor first. A managed resignation resets the nine against a new Speaker with no record to run against. This is the countermove, and it is the likeliest thing to happen.
The House impeaches both offices in the same effort, on the same record.
TAKES 218
FAILS IF: the House takes one and not the other. Removing the President by himself promotes the Vice President and closes the question for good.
The Senate tries it and convicts. Everything above this line is preparation for this line.
TAKES 67
FAILS IF: it is 66. This number has never been reached and no version of this pretends otherwise.
Succession under 3 U.S.C. § 19. The Speaker resigns the chair and, per the statute, the House seat, and serves out the term.
TAKES NO VOTE · TAKES A STATUTE ON THE BOOKS SINCE 1947
FAILS IF: the non-member theory does not hold. The statute then sends the office to the President pro tempore. Settled in advance or the sequence does not start.
Below this line is version 1, from August.
What changed: the front is now about what can be done while the House is out · several facts were corrected · nothing below was rewritten. Version 1 assumed a funding lapse on September 30 and thirteen session days; the stopgap signed September 2 runs to December 11, so its calendar and its figures are superseded. The list.
Impeach
them now.
Them means Trump and Vance. Both, in the same effort, because removing one alone is a promotion.
Nine House Republicans can open the door. Under the rules of this Congress a motion to vacate the speakership is privileged when a majority-party member offers it with eight majority-party cosponsors. Nine to open, 218 to force a floor vote, 67 to finish. The first number is the only one nobody has tried.
A proposal for doing something lawful, on a deadline, starting now.
Almost every conversation about impeachment in this country has been a conversation about one man, and that is why none of them has gone anywhere. Removing Donald Trump by himself hands the presidency to JD Vance, who inherits the record below intact. An impeachment that stops at the top of the ticket is not accountability. It is a promotion.
So the claim here is about the remedy rather than about equal culpability. Whatever the relative case against each officer, conviction has to reach both or the exercise accomplishes nothing. That is what the word them is doing, and it is easier to defend than any argument about who did more.
The case underneath is short. Two wars are being run by men who will not end either one. The election that could remove them is being worked on from the inside, by executive order and by agency and by a bill the House has passed and the Senate has never taken up. And people are carrying the cost of all of it at the grocery store, the pharmacy counter, and the pump while being told the situation is fine.
The Constitution has a remedy and nobody has to break a law to use it. The House impeaches. The Senate tries. If both offices come open, an act Congress passed in 1947 says who holds the presidency until January 2029. This page is a proposal, not a plan already underway. It names the one link that has never been tested and says plainly that the link gets settled before anybody moves.
Pick the thing you care about.
Whatever brought you here, or whatever was already on your mind before it did. Then follow it out and see where it lands.
He has been impeached twice. Nothing happened.
That is the first thing anybody says, and it is true. It is also the argument for building it differently rather than the argument for not building it at all. Here is what has been tried.
| The effort | When | What it produced | Put anyone on a ballot? |
|---|---|---|---|
| First impeachment | Dec 2019 – Feb 2020 | Acquitted February 5, 2020. The first article failed 52–48, with one Republican voting to convict. | No |
| Second impeachment | Jan – Feb 2021 | Impeached January 13, 2021 with ten Republicans. Acquitted 57–43 on February 13, with seven Republican senators voting to convict. | No |
| January 6 select committee | 2021 – 2022 | A report, public hearings, criminal referrals. The referrals carried no legal force. | No |
| Section 3 disqualification | 2023 – 2024 | Trump v. Anderson, March 4, 2024. The Colorado ruling was reversed and enforcement against a federal candidate was held to require an act of Congress. | No |
| Federal prosecutions | 2023 – 2024 | The documents case was dismissed in July 2024. On November 25, 2024 the special counsel moved to dismiss the January 6 case and drop the documents appeal, citing the policy against prosecuting a sitting President. | No |
| New York prosecution | 2023 – 2025 | Convicted May 30, 2024 on 34 counts. Sentenced January 10, 2025 to an unconditional discharge — no fine, no probation, no confinement. The appeal is pending. | No |
| Georgia RICO case | 2023 – | The district attorney was disqualified and the case has not moved since. | No |
| Civil judgments | 2023 – 2024 | Money, appealed. No effect on the holding of office. | No |
That is the design flaw and it is the same flaw every time. Each of these was conducted inside the building, on the building's clock, with the public watching rather than participating. The verdict arrived after the moment anybody outside could act on it, or in the case of both impeachments, on a schedule with no election anywhere near it.
Which is also the answer to the other version of the question, the one that says wait until after November. If accountability after an election worked, nine years of it would have produced something by now. What has not been tried is the arrangement where the vote happens first, the record is public while people can still do something about it, and the ballot is weeks away rather than years.
Five steps. Four are law and the fifth is arithmetic.
The pieces have been sitting in the Constitution, the House rules, and Title 3 of the U.S. Code for decades. Nobody has put them together.
Nine Republicans vacate the chair
The motion is privileged only when a majority-party member offers it with eight majority-party cosponsors — nine members acting in concert. On October 3, 2023 the House defeated a motion to table 208 to 218 and then vacated the speakership 216 to 210, with eight Republicans joining every Democrat present. That is the first motion to vacate ever to succeed, and the most recent attempt failed badly: the May 8, 2024 motion against Speaker Johnson was tabled 359 to 43. Note also that the 2023 motion was offered by a single member under the previous Congress's rules. It proves a vacatur can carry. It does not prove nine is reachable.
The House elects a caretaker as Speaker
Someone chosen for one job who agrees in public and in writing not to seek the 2028 nomination as the price of being elected. Article I gives the House the power to choose its Speaker with no qualification attached, and the Parliamentarian's manual treats sitting membership as tradition rather than requirement. A Speaker is elected by a majority of members voting for a candidate by name, so the threshold falls with every member who votes present or is absent.
Both are impeached, on separate articles
Separate resolutions rather than one combined article, which is how it has always been done. On the presiding-officer question: the Chief Justice presides only when the President is tried, and no Vice President has ever been impeached, so the question is genuinely open. The workable answer is that the Senate designates its presiding officer under its own impeachment rules and would not seat the accused in that chair. That is a practice answer rather than a constitutional one and it should be stated as such.
Conviction opens both offices and the statute takes over
With no President and no Vice President, the Speaker resigns the speakership and acts as President through January 20, 2029. The Presidential Succession Act has been on the books since 1947 and no court has ruled on it.
The chair opens again
This step is a political expectation and not a legal mechanism, and it is tagged accordingly. The coalition that elected a caretaker at step two is the same coalition still sitting in the room, and electing a second Speaker is a smaller version of what it already did. Jeffries is the obvious choice and the caucus decides for itself. Whoever takes it holds through November and until January 3, when a new Congress seats a new caucus.
The one link that has never been tested
Section 19(a)(1) conditions the Speaker's accession on resignation "as Speaker and as Representative in Congress." A Speaker who never held a House seat has no seat to resign. Nobody has litigated whether that is a qualification or a condition, and § 19(a)(2) provides that a Speaker who fails to qualify is passed over in favor of the President pro tempore of the Senate — currently Charles Grassley of Iowa, elected to that post on January 3, 2025.
Two things are worth saying plainly rather than leaving to an opponent. A non-member Speaker actually cures the older and better-known objection, since there is no seat held simultaneously and no Incompatibility Clause problem — the design trades a constitutional question for a statutory one, which is a trade worth making and worth naming. And this question gets resolved before anyone proceeds. No Senate convicts two officers and then finds out the following morning that nobody checked. The sequence is slow and public and it stops moving the moment this is open.
The alternative, if the question resolves badly, is a sitting House member under the identical pledge, which removes the novel link entirely.I
A second track that runs whether or not the nine ever show up
A discharge petition takes 218 signatures and seven legislative days to ripen, after which any signer can force the matter onto the floor and the Speaker has a short window to schedule it. The Clerk posts the signatures as they are collected.P
Nobody has to wonder where their member stands and nobody finds out in January. They sign in front of everyone or they decline in front of everyone, and either way it happens before November.
The whole thing turns on who walks through the door.
People will not read a five-step sequence. They will look at one person and decide in about four seconds whether this was a restoration or a seizure. That judgment is the campaign and it gets made on a biography rather than a brief.
Somebody who does not want the job — and signs something saying so
Gerald Ford gave his word in 1973 and ran anyway in 1976, which is why a disposition is not enough. What the pledge has to be is an instrument: a dated written statement of non-candidacy, a commitment to make no appointments to lifetime offices, and a commitment to leave on January 20, 2029. A document can be held up. A character reference cannot.
Somebody who knows these wars
Most of this case rests on Ukraine, on Iran, and on what has happened in Gaza. A caretaker who cannot talk about all three with real authority hands the argument to somebody else on the first day.
Somebody the military follows without stopping to think about it
In a contested succession that is not a theoretical question, and uniformed service is the shortest road to the answer.
Somebody the country already recognizes
If it takes a paragraph to explain why this person, the explanation has already lost. It has to work as a headline and a photograph.
Mark Kelly is what that looks like
Twenty-five years in the Navy and thirty-nine combat missions over Iraq. Four shuttle flights, the last one commanding Endeavour on STS-134. A seat on Senate Armed Services and a Russia sanctions record that goes back well before this administration. Elected statewide twice, in the 2020 special and the 2022 general, in a state this President carried, and not on the ballot again until 2028, so putting him in the chair costs the Senate nothing this cycle.P
His wife was shot in the head at a meeting with her own constituents and lived.
When this argument says political violence has been normalized from the top, that family is not an example anybody had to go looking for.
He has said nothing about any of this and has agreed to nothing. He is here because he shows what the job description looks like when somebody fills it. If he is not the one, the description still stands and other people fit it, in both chambers and outside government entirely. Anybody arguing for a different name should argue against the description rather than around it.I
Nine of sixteen.
Sixteen House Republicans are leaving public office entirely at the end of this term. No primary, no general, nothing left to lose. That is the honest pool, and nine of sixteen is a harder ask than the larger number would suggest.D
One of the sixteen has already cast this vote once. Dan Newhouse of Washington's 4th was one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach in January 2021. He is leaving Congress at the end of this term. Of those ten, only David Valadao of California's 22nd is still running — and his seat is rated a toss-up. The other eight are gone from the House entirely.
That is what the ask costs, stated plainly, and it is also the shortest list of people who have already demonstrated they will pay it.D
| Member | District | Status | 2024 margin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dan Newhouse | WA-4 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Voted to impeach 2021 Nothing to lose |
| Don Bacon | NE-2 | Leaving office | Harris +4.6 | Harris district Nothing to lose |
| Darrell Issa | CA-48 | Leaving office | Trump +15.3 * | Nothing to lose |
| Burgess Owens | UT-4 | Leaving office | Trump +20.0 * | Nothing to lose |
| Michael McCaul | TX-10 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Vern Buchanan | FL-16 | Leaving office | Trump +15.5 | Nothing to lose |
| Neal Dunn | FL-2 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Daniel Webster | FL-11 | Leaving office | Trump +16.2 | Nothing to lose |
| Mark Amodei | NV-2 | Leaving office | Trump +13.9 | Nothing to lose |
| Barry Loudermilk | GA-11 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Ryan Zinke | MT-1 | Leaving office | Trump +11.5 | Nothing to lose |
| Sam Graves | MO-6 | Leaving office | Trump, safe * | Nothing to lose |
| Elise Stefanik | NY-21 | Leaving office (dropped gov bid Dec 19, 2025) | Trump +20.6 | Nothing to lose |
| Troy Nehls | TX-22 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Jodey Arrington | TX-19 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Morgan Luttrell | TX-8 | Leaving office | Trump, safe | Nothing to lose |
| Tony Gonzales | TX-23 | Resigned April 14, 2026 | Trump +15.5 * | Seat vacant |
| Chuck Edwards | NC-11 | Withdrew Aug 5, 2026; serving out term | Trump +9.5 * | Serving out term |
| Kevin Hern | OK-1 | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Julia Letlow | LA-5 | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Harriet Hageman | WY-AL | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Wesley Hunt | TX-38 | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Ashley Hinson | IA-2 | Running for Senate | Trump +9.9 | |
| Barry Moore | AL-1 | Running for Senate | Trump +55.1 | |
| Mike Collins | GA-10 | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Earl L. Carter | GA-1 | Running for Senate | Trump, safe | |
| Andy Barr | KY-6 | Running for Senate | Trump +15.0 | |
| David Schweikert | AZ-1 | Running for governor | Trump +3.1 | |
| Andy Biggs | AZ-5 | Running for governor | Trump +19.9 | |
| John James | MI-10 | Running for governor | Trump +6.5 | |
| Nancy Mace | SC-1 | Running for governor | Trump +13.0 | |
| Ralph Norman | SC-5 | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| Dusty Johnson | SD-AL | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| Randy Feenstra | IA-4 | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| Tom Tiffany | WI-7 | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| John Rose | TN-6 | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| Byron Donalds | FL-19 | Running for governor | Trump, safe | |
| Chip Roy | TX-21 | Ran for attorney general | Trump, safe * |
Ballotpedia non-reelection tracker, 36 as of July 23, 2026, called likely final. Asterisked margins come from districts redrawn since 2024 and are not directly comparable to current lines.D
None of these people need to be talked into anything. What they need is cover, and building it is the actual work.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict in 2021. Three are still serving today — Collins, Murkowski, and Cassidy, who is a lame duck through January after finishing third in his primary on May 16 of this year.P Anybody asking a Republican to cross knows the size of the ask, and the campaign has to be built to carry that weight instead of talking around it.
They are working on the election right now.
Nobody has to change a rule to change an election. They have been trying to change the rules anyway, since the spring of 2025, in the open, with dates and documents attached to every step.
What follows is federal action only. An order, a vote, a ruling, a filing. No speeches, and nothing anybody has to take on faith.P
What a documentary-proof requirement would do is not a matter of opinion. The Center for American Progress finds that 84 percent of women who marry change their surname, meaning as many as 69 million American women hold a birth certificate that no longer carries their legal name, and that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport. A 2023 SSRS survey for the Brennan Center, VoteRiders and the University of Maryland put 21.3 million voting-age citizens — 9.1 percent — as lacking ready access to a document proving citizenship.D
One correction, offered here before somebody else makes it. The idea that a losing party could hold a chamber on January 3 under Article I, Section 5 and put that past any court is half right at best. Roudebush v. Hartke concerns a recount and confirms that a house judges the elections of its own members. Reading it to mean a party that lost may keep a majority it lost is a stretch, and it is a stretch this page declines to make.I
Nobody is making him stop.
Russia is losing this war on the battlefield by a margin with almost no modern parallel, and it has not mattered, because losing a war and being forced to end one are different things and the second requires somebody with standing to insist.
The one government with the standing to force the question has spent eighteen months declining to, and the war continues for as long as that holds.
Iran and Gaza belong in the same paragraph
The 2026 Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz came out of the same posture toward the same patron, and the bill arrived on American kitchen tables inside of weeks. On April 2 the national average for a gallon of regular passed four dollars for the first time since August 2022, and it has crossed back above four twice since. Roughly twenty million barrels a day and about a fifth of the world's oil move through that strait.D
Gaza is not a footnote to that and should not be written as one. The destruction of the strip and the scale of civilian death there happened with American weapons, American vetoes, and American cover, and it happened while this administration described itself as brokering peace. It has cost the United States standing with governments and populations whose cooperation any settlement in the region requires, and that loss is now one of the things standing in the way of ending any of it.
Three theaters, one posture, one set of decision-makers. Ukraine is first in the order because Moscow's position in Washington is what holds the rest in place, and not because the other two matter less.I
The mechanism is downstream of the bill at the register.
Nobody is being asked to set aside what they are living through in order to care about a constitutional argument.
Behind those numbers is everything they do not capture. Electricity bills climbing in regions where data center construction outran the grid. Rural hospitals closing and the people they served driving an hour to be seen. Groceries that never came back down, and farm labor pulled out of the fields by enforcement actions taken with no regard for the harvest. Immigration enforcement conducted by people who will not identify themselves. Climate work reversed while the weather that prompted it did not moderate and the insurance market repriced whole states in response.
None of that is a separate grievance from the rest of this page. It is the same government, in the same period, making the same kind of decision, and the people absorbing it have been saying so at volume for two years.
Ask every one of them, and write down what they say.
All 435 members of the House and all 100 senators, by name, in public, with the answer recorded the day it is given. Not a whip count somebody keeps privately. A register anybody can read, kept from Labor Day forward.
The objection that gets made first
Impeachment has twice made a president stronger. Clinton reached 73 percent in December 1998 and Trump hit a personal-best 49 percent around the February 2020 acquittal, and anybody serious will raise that before raising anything else.
What was true of both is that neither had any electoral consequence attached to it. No roll call weeks before a national election. No published register of who answered and who would not. No ballot waiting on the other side of the vote. Both were arguments conducted entirely inside the building, and the public was an audience rather than a party to them. This is built the other way round, and that is the difference the objection does not account for.I
The register outlasts the vote
Removal probably does not happen in this Senate and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Senators elected on November 3 are not sworn until January 3, so this Congress is the only jury available inside this window and the next Congress is a separate effort with a separate arithmetic.
What happens regardless is that 535 people go on the record, and that record does not expire on Election Day. Whoever will not vote to remove a President two federal courts have found acting unlawfully is the same person who will not stand up in November when the count is being fought over. Assembling that list in September means it exists in November instead of being put together in the week it turns out to be needed.
October is not on the calendar.
This is the number that governs everything on the page and almost nobody has looked at it. As published, the House is out for the week of Labor Day, in session for roughly three weeks in September, and then away from the first of October until November 9 — six days after the election.
A legislative calendar is a decision rather than a law. The Speaker can call the House back, the schedule can be amended, and this one already carries a revision from March. So the thirteen days below are what leadership has chosen to schedule, not what the Constitution allows — which makes the calendar itself one of the things worth asking about.I
A discharge petition ripens over 7 legislative days and the scheduling window takes 2 more, which consumes nine of the thirteen. On the schedule as it stands, everything has to happen in September and the margin is about four days. Adding October days would change that arithmetic, and adding them is within the House's power.
Labor Day — start
The demand goes public. Impeach them both, and here is the mechanism that does it. The House is not in Washington this week, which makes it the right week to be everywhere else. This argument is addressed to working people and the coalition that carries it is a labor coalition before it is anything else.
The only window there is
Roughly thirteen session days. The motion, the petition, the signatures, and any floor vote all have to happen inside this stretch. Every member and every senator gets asked by name and the answers go up as they arrive.
Funding lapses
The fiscal year ends the day before the House leaves. Whatever is riding on a funding bill gets decided in the last week anyone is in the building.
Scheduled away
Thirty-eight days with no floor and no roll call on the published calendar. The House can come back — the Speaker can call it in and members can demand it — so if there is no October vote, that is a decision somebody made rather than a rule somebody followed. Absent that, whatever is on the record by October 1 is what voters have when they decide.
Election Day
The country renders its verdict on the names.
A new Congress, a new arithmetic
New members are sworn. Whatever this effort did not finish restarts here, with a different Senate and the register already built.
Built to bend
This is aimed at a whole body politic and it will take hits from every direction, most of them in good faith. So it is built to absorb them. The caretaker can change. The order of the two impeachments can change. The petition can lead or the motion can lead. Somebody may find a better name than Kelly, or a better way to put the question to a member in Bucks County than the way it gets put in Tucson.
What does not change is the demand. Both of them, lawfully, before November. The calendar is the other thing on the table — thirteen days is what has been scheduled, and anybody who says there is no time to do this is describing a schedule they can change.
The vote is the point.
Conviction takes two-thirds of the senators present rather than sixty-seven of a hundred, so absences move the number. Worth knowing, and not the argument. The argument is that a whole Congress is about to face voters without ever having been made to say where it stands on any of this.
Not one of those sixteen has ever been made to say on a recorded vote whether a President two federal courts have found acting unlawfully ought to keep the job. Make them say it in September and their voters answer in November.
The arithmetic on the far side is worth stating straight, because the straight version is stronger than the sales version. Thirty-six Democratic seats are not on this ballot. If Democrats held every one of the eleven of their own seats that are up and won all twenty-two Republican seats, that would be sixty-nine — above the threshold. It is a ceiling and not a forecast, it runs through Alabama and Wyoming and Oklahoma, and it describes a Senate that is not seated until January.I Say all of that plainly. It still proves the door is not welded shut, and it puts every safe-seat senator on notice that a no vote is a bet his own state will never get around to asking.
Where this goes without it
- Two million casualties and no exit from any of the three theaters
- Adverse rulings and the conduct continuing
- A state asking a judge to keep federal troops off its streets on Election Day
- A funding fight on the last day anyone is in the building
- Sixteen senators who never had to answer
What is being asked for instead
- A motion with a precedent from 2023
- A petition signed where people can see it
- Articles voted on the floor of the House
- A roll call published the day it happens
- A statute Congress passed in 1947
- An election held on time in November
All of it is legal. Most of it is ordinary. It can start on Labor Day.
Where each of these came from.
Listed so the claims can be checked rather than taken. Where a figure moves week to week it is dated. Where something here is an argument rather than a fact, it is not in this table.
What changed, and what was wrong.
Kept in public because this whole argument is about records that outlast a calendar. A page asking members to go on the record has to be on the record itself.
Still open, and said to be open. Whether the nine-member threshold survives the rules package a new Congress writes in January 2027. It was adopted January 3, 2025 by 215 to 209 and has to be adopted again. Nobody has said whether it will be, which is one of the reasons this page is dated the way it is.
Whether the non-member Speaker theory holds is the other, and it is laid out above rather than buried.