Impeach Trump again because America 'cannot risk his becoming president' in 2024: Ex-solicitor general

President Donald Trump may be heading for the exit in two weeks, but he has already been hinting that he will again run for the presidency in 2024.

Former Solicitor General Neal Katyal, writing with messaging consultant Sam Koppelman of Fenway Strategies, argues in the New York Times that the risk of Trump winning the 2024 election is so severe that Congress ought to try to preemptively block it by impeaching the president for a second time.

"Whether he acknowledges it or not, President Trump is leaving the White House on Jan. 20 -- but right now, there is nothing stopping him from running in 2024," they argue. "That is a terrifying prospect, because the way he has conducted himself over the past two months, wielding the power of the presidency to try to steal another term in office, has threatened one of our republic's most essential traditions: the peaceful transfer of power."

Katyal and Koppelman write that Trump's most obvious and egregious abuse of power was his demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find" a sufficient number of votes to overturn his state's election.

"In a democracy, you don't find votes," they write. "You count them. Most strikingly, Mr. Trump threatened the Georgia officials with criminal prosecution if they didn't comply, saying leaving the vote counts intact would be a 'big risk.'"

They conclude that the only way to completely block Trump from again taking power is to impeach him and convict him in the Senate.

"We cannot risk Mr. Trump's becoming president again -- or for that matter, even running again with a chance of winning," they write. "This isn't a point about ideology; it's a reflection of the fact that our system may not be able to withstand this lawless man returning to the highest office in the land."