Democrats and Republicans can agree on at least one thing these days.
Politicians in both parties want a quick end to the Senate trial of Donald John Trump. They want to put the matter of his incitement of insurrection to rest quickly so they can move on to take care of business that matters to you and me.
I agree with ’em.
The result likely won’t please me. Trump has been accused of inciting the mob of terrorists to storm Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. To my way of thinking, it’s a clear case of insurrection against the government. Trump egged the lunatics on. The House impeached him one week later and a week after that he left office.
The Senate, which is split 50-50, isn’t likely to convict Trump. The Senate needs 17 GOP members to see the light; some of them will, but not nearly enough to secure a constitutionally mandated conviction … which would precede another vote to bar him from seeking public office for the rest of his miserable life.
I am going to cling to the “unity” on both sides of the great divide. Let’s get this matter over with and done. We have a pandemic to fight and an economy to restore!
Richard Shelby of Alabama today became the third prominent U.S. Senate Republican to announce he won’t seek re-election in 2022.
He joins Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania as declaring themselves to be lame ducks.
I know what you are thinking: Where is he going with this?
Might they now muster up the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, of exhorting the terrorists to storm into the Senate chamber where the second of Trump’s impeachment trials is about to begin?
Shelby, Portman and Toomey can join GOP Sens. Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and perhaps Susan Collins as possible votes to convict Trump. That leaves only 11 more Republicans to persuade to do the right thing.
Trump can do nothing to those who are leaving public office. Therefore, the threat of reprisal against those politicians is a goner. Just sayin’, man.
It is widely known that freedom of speech has its limitations, even though they aren’t spelled out directly in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The most commonly used example is how “One cannot yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater.”
With that is this brief rebuke of Donald Trump’s legal team defense of his action on the Sixth of January. The Trump team suggests that the ex-president was merely exercising his constitutional guarantee of free speech when he told the riotous mob of terrorists to march on Capitol Hill and “take back our country.”
They heard Trump. They acted on what they heard. They stormed the Capitol Building looking for Vice President Mike Pence and congressional leaders who were gathered to continue the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden, who beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Several of the rioters told media folks covering the event that they were acting specifically on the demand that Trump made of them! It is recorded! For posterity!
Five people died in the melee! Five lives were sacrificed because, in minds of the lawyers defending Trump in his second impeachment trial, he was speaking freely.
What a crock of fecal matter!
Donald Trump incited the riot. He is guilty as hell of “incitement of insurrection.” The free speech clause in the First Amendment does not apply to what he did on that terrible day.
I am acutely aware that none of this argument is going to change any senators’ minds if they are inclined to acquit Trump on charges that he sought to destroy our democratic form of government. It’s just that the free speech argument is laughable on its face.
We’re halfway to being fully immunized in our house.
I got my first Pfizer vaccine a little more than a week ago. My much better half, aka my bride, got her Pfizer shot this past week.
In two weeks I will return to the VA Medical Center in south Dallas for my second dose; my bride returns to John Clark Stadium in nearby Plano for hers.
What does that mean in terms of our lifestyle? Nothing, man. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing since, oh, this past summer. Which is that we’re going to stay mostly away from restaurants, we will keep wearing masks, we’ll be washing our hands frequently and feverishly, we’ll splash sanitizer on our hands as well, we will maintain appropriate “social distance” from everyone we see.
That’s how we intend to live for the foreseeable future.
I highly recommend that all Americans follow our lead. We have to get through this pandemic together … right? Right!
But … it did. Tom Brady has established himself as the greatest quarterback of all time. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the defending champ Kansas City Chiefs in a Super Bowl blowout.
I pulled hard for the Chiefs, given that I am a longtime AFC fan.
Back to Brady.
He led the New England Patriots to nine Super Bowls. He won six of them as QB for the Pats. Then he leaves New England for Tampa Bay. What happened then? The Patriots this year missed the playoffs altogether. The Bucs win it all!
President Biden has six members of the Cabinet confirmed by the Senate and sworn into office.
He needs the rest of them. Now! Or at the very least as soon as is humanly possible, given the other thing that is occupying senators’ minds right now. That would be the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
I want the Senate to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection. To my way of thinking, it won’t take much time for House impeachment managers to make the case that Trump’s ghastly rhetoric on Jan. 6 ignited the riot that swarmed over Capitol Hill and could have disrupted the constitutional process of certifying the election that Biden won.
The Senate, though, can multi-task. It can hear evidence for half a day and then spend the other half considering Cabinet nominees and then voting on them.
President Biden was denied a smooth transition from Trump’s team. Trump get yammering about vote fraud that didn’t exist. He challenged the results of a free and fair election.
To be sure the president is moving rapidly on the pandemic front and in trying to get relief for millions of Americans affected by the killer virus. However, he needs an entire team suited up and ready to implement presidential policy.
That requires the Senate to confirm them. The attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland, deserves a hearing … to state the most glaring vacancy still needing to be filled.
Joe Biden needs to be able to govern effectively and with clarity. He needs the executive branch of government to run with maximum efficiency.
Someone will have to explain this bit of logic to me.
Donald J. Trump’s legal team is preparing to argue at their client’s impeachment trial that the trial is unconstitutional. Why is that? Because you cannot “impeach a president” who is no longer in office.
That’s what I hear them preparing to say.
Except for this little factoid. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump on Jan. 13. He was still the president of the United States when the House impeached him.
Thus, and this is just little ol’ me, the impeachment is quite constitutional. Donald Trump had a week to go before he high-tailed it to Florida.
The Senate trial cannot remove him from office, which I guess factors into what Trump’s lawyers are thinking. However, and this is important, the Constitution does not specify that a president must still be in office during a trial.
Article I, Section 3 of the founding governing document notes that “judgment shall not extend further than to removal from office.” The founders did not say that removal was the only punishment; my reading of the constitutional text tells me that the punishment could not exceed removal. So … what’s the deal with that argument against conducting an impeachment trial of a former president?
If the Senate convicts Trump — and that is a huge mountain to scale, I know — then it could have a separate vote to bar Trump from ever seeking public office. The conviction bar is high, requiring a two-thirds vote; the ancillary vote requires only a simple majority of the Senate.
I know that I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar. I know what the Constitution says, though, and it tells me that a Senate trial meets the constitutional standard.
Impeachment is not the issue. The House delivered the goods while Trump was in office. The burden falls solely on the Senate to demand that Trump be held accountable for inciting the riot that damn near wrecked our democratic form of government.
I sure hope I don’t choke on these words, so I’ll take great care when I write them.
It is that I am proud of U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., for standing on principle and not “bending” to the whims of partisan hacks.
Cheney has come under intense fire from Donald Trump’s core of lunatics who are angry at her because she voted on Jan. 13 to impeach their hero. The Wyoming Republican Party has censured her for her vote.
Rep. Cheney isn’t backing down. Not one bit!
She told “Fox News Sunday” this morning: “The oath that I took to the Constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment, and it doesn’t bend to partisanship. It doesn’t bend to political pressure,” she added. “It’s the most important oath that we take, and so I will stand by that, and I will continue to fight for all of the issues that matter so much to us all across Wyoming.”
How about that, ladies and gentlemen? She reveres the oath she took when she joined the House of Representatives. That oath compels her to protect the Constitution and the laws of the land. She did not swear any fealty to Donald Trump. She didn’t give him a pass for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection that well could have brought great physical harm to all 535 members of Congress … and the then-vice president, Mike Pence.
They were gathered on Capitol Hill to do their constitutional duty, which was to certify the results of an election that proclaimed President Joe Biden the winner over Donald Trump.
Cheney and the other GOP House members who voted to impeach Trump all have incurred the wrath of the Trumpkin Corps.
I mentioned “choking” on these words. It is because Liz Cheney is not my kind of politician. She is too right-wing for my taste. I would not vote for her if I lived in Wyoming.
However, I am addressing only her principled stand against the insurrection that Donald Trump incited with his angry rhetoric to the mob that stood before him.
It is amazing in the extreme that Rep. Cheney would have to defend her vote to defend the Constitution, but she did … and for that I am proud of her.
You’ve heard it said, I am sure, that if Donald Trump didn’t commit an impeachable act on Jan. 6, then “what does constitute such an act?”
It is my considered belief that Trump’s incitement of an insurrection against a co-equal branch of government on that day, just two weeks before he was to exit the presidency, is the worst singular act that any president ever has committed.
The U.S. Senate this week is going to conduct its fourth presidential impeachment; Trump has been tried in two of them.
The first one occurred in 1868 when President Andrew Johnson stood trial for violating the Tenure of Office Act after he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without notifying the Senate; he escaped conviction by a single vote.
The next one occurred in 1999 when President Bill Clinton stood trial on a charge of perjury; he lied to a grand jury about an affair he was having with a White House intern. The perjury case was the basis of three impeachment articles. The Senate acquitted him on all three.
And then we had the first Trump impeachment trial in 2020. Trump was impeached for abuse of power and for obstruction of Congress based on a phone conversation he had with Ukraine’s president in which he asked the foreign head of state for political dirt on a rival … who happened by presidential candidate Joseph Biden. The Senate acquitted him on both counts.
Here we are today. What Trump did on Jan. 6 was provoke a mob of terrorists to march on the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results of a free and fair election. The riot on Capitol Hill killed five people. The terrorists were angry over the lie that Trump kept repeating that alleged “massive vote fraud” where none existed.
The rioters stormed into the very Senate chamber where 100 “jurors” are going to stand in judgment of the man who exhorted the rioters to do the damage they inflicted on our very democratic system of government.
Think for a moment about what might have occurred had the terrorists actually gotten their mitts onto Vice President Mike Pence — who they wanted to hang. Or had they found Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who they said they would execute.
This isn’t a close call, senators.
Yes, Trump is out of office, but the trial meets constitutional muster. He can be tried after being impeached one week before leaving office. Trump can be held accountable. He must be held to account for the hideous conduct he exhibited after the 2020 election.
Many of us are waiting for Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial to begin.
It’s not that I am expecting an epiphany of courage to result in a conviction. I am expecting another acquittal, although there might be enough Republican senators to cross into the conviction line to make somewhat interesting.
The House impeached Trump on a single count of incitement of insurrection. Goodness, the evidence is mountainous. It’s there for the all the world to see, and which it has seen already. He exhorted a riotous mob of terrorists to march on Capitol Hill; it did and you know what happened.
My strong hunch that no amount of testimony from the House managers presenting their case in the Senate is going to persuade any Republican senators to change their minds, getting them to convict instead of acquit Trump. I sense a few GOP senators are leaning to convict Trump; I am thinking of Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman (who announced he won’t seek another term), Susan Collins and maybe one or two others. That’s far short of the 17 GOP senators required to produce a conviction in a 50-50 Senate lineup.
Democrats likely will hold firm and convict Trump.
What might the House prosecutors aim to do if they realize that a conviction isn’t meant to occur? They’re going to speak to the rest of us watching from our living rooms. They well might decide to destroy whatever is left of Trump’s political credibility, seeking to deny him any footing on which he could launch another political campaign in 2024.
Senators are going to take an oath to be impartial. The oath, though, is a joke. To be fair, Democrats have made up their minds as well as have Republicans. As has been noted before, an impeachment trial in the Senate is a political event, not a judicial one.
That said, I would surely vote to convict Trump if I had a say in the outcome. Instead, I am left just to speculate from the peanut gallery along with the rest of the nation.
My speculation at this moment leads me to believe that Trump won’t face any official sanction from the Senate. Still, it is clearly worth the effort that House prosecutors will exert as they lay out for the whole Earth the evidence we have seen that Donald John Trump is a scurrilous imposter who had no business masquerading as our nation’s president.
