Tag Archives: Senate trial

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Trump’s latest ‘worst’ event finally hits bottom … I hope

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

There have been more “worst” moments of Donald Trump’s time as a politician and as president that I cannot keep track of them all.

He denigrated John McCain’s service to the nation; he mocked a New York Times reporter’s physical ailment; he chastised a Gold Star couple; he has issued insults left and right; his incessant lying; he most recently implied that a late congressman might be resting eternally in hell.

Well, the events that occurred in the House of Representatives I believe qualifies as the worst thing to happen to this individual’s presidency. The House voted to impeach Trump on two counts. It was a partisan vote, but it’s a vote nonetheless. Trump’s tenure as president is now marked indelibly with the label of “impeached.”

It could get worse. It likely won’t unless hell freezes over and the Senate actually convicts Trump either of abuse of power or obstruction of Congress.

Trump hit the campaign trail and at the moment the House was impeaching him, he was standing at a podium in Battle Creek, Mich., where he made the idiotic crack about the late John Dingell “looking up” at the world from, um, the depths of hell.

The day of Trump’s impeachment has been called historic, seminal, pivotal, monumental … all of the above and even some more superlative descriptions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Democrats are motivated purely by “partisan” hatred of Trump. Ironic, yes? This comes from the guy who has perfected partisanship to an art form.

So, what now? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is withholding the articles of impeachment until she learns the rules under which the Senate will conduct its trial. She wants it to be “fair.” Well, duh? My hope is that McConnell agrees to conduct a “fair” trial.

As for the president, he will have the indelible mark of being an “impeached” head of state. It’s a designation he has earned. Of that I have no doubt.

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What about the other side?

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My friends on the left — those who, as I do, support the impeachment of Donald Trump — will not like what I am about to say. They will accuse of me invoking that “both-siderism” mantra.

Fairness dictates that I say it. So, here goes.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and many of his Republican acolytes deserve the criticism they are receiving for their unwillingness to look at all the evidence before deciding to find Trump not guilty of the transgressions that the House of Representatives will send to them.

However, those on the other side — the individuals who have decided to convict the president — are guilty of being as close-minded as those across the aisle.

I have heard countless Democratic senators say the same thing that McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham and other GOP senators have said, which is that they have seen enough already to make up their minds.

All 100 senators are going to take an oath when the Senate trial commences. The oath will pledge them to look with impartiality and without bias at all the evidence they will hear when the House managers and Trump’s legal team present their cases.

I am willing to concede that I have seen and heard enough to make up my own mind. Then again, I am not among the 100 Senate “jurors” who will take that oath. I am free to state my own bias, my own view and offer my own conclusion.

U.S. senators don’t have that luxury. For them, be they Democrat or Republican, to declare their intention before hearing a single word of testimony in a Senate trial is, shall we say, a violation of the oath they will take.

The irony is that they will sit in judgment of a president who’s been accused of doing the very same thing.

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How is McConnell able to serve as a Senate ‘juror’?

I am baffled. The U.S. Senate majority leader is seeking to grease a pending Senate trial in favor of the president of the United States.

And this will occur after he takes an oath administered by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to be an impartial juror.

How does that work?

Mitch McConnell is working with the White House to ensure a favorable outcome for Donald Trump, who’s about to be impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate will get the matter and will conduct a trial to determine whether Trump should be convicted of two high crimes and misdemeanors: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

All 100 senators will serve as jurors in a trial presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. But how in the name of impartial juris prudence can Majority Leader McConnell perform the duties he will swear he will do if he’s attempting to rig the outcome in favor of the president?

This isn’t how you’re supposed to do it.

I get that the trial isn’t strictly a judicial affair, that it’s tinged with politics through and through. However, there is supposed to be a certain level of judicial decorum involved when the jurors take an oath to judge the evidence fairly and with an open mind.

For the leader of the Senate to work against that very oath is a serious violation of the duties he is supposed to perform.

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Expecting impeachment to drag this campaign into the ditch

If we try to project how this impeachment saga will play out, we ought to be left with a distressing prognosis.

It is that no matter how it ends, the upcoming 2020 presidential campaign is likely to be dragged into the deepest dietch you can imagine.

Donald Trump at this moment is likely to survive a trial in the U.S. Senate after the House of Representatives impeaches him for various high crimes and misdemeanors.

If you’re a Democratic challenger, you might want to talk about issues of the day. Things that ought to matter to Americans who will be voting for president of the United States. But then you’ll have to deal with Trump’s manic obsession with the impeachment.

He is unable to set impeachment into one cranial compartment while concentrating (more or less) fully on the upcoming issues debate. No way! He is obsessed with impeachment.

When the House impeaches him, my hope is that it is done soon. I also hope the Senate can dispense with the trial soon. I do not want the impeachment and trial to hang over the campaign. Alas, it will hang anyway, given Trump’s inability or unwillingness to put it into perspective in the event he survives the Senate trial.

I can imagine now that he is likely and quite willing to keep mentioning the impeachment as he campaigns for re-election. He will use the impeachment and trial as a sort of shield against legitimate criticism that could come from his political foe.

You know: his refusal to acknowledge climate change as the existential threat it has become; his continuing effort to pi** off our valued allies; Trump’s inability to cut the deficit as he promised he would do; the president’s poor choice of key aides and Cabinet members; the fact that so many top level positions remain vacant or are filled by “acting” Cabinet members or agency heads.

The president will ensure that we do not forget that the House impeached him and that the Senate “acquitted” him, although it might be on a technicality, given the high bar set by the Constitution for removal after a Senate trial.

Yep, the 2020 presidential campaign is heading for the ditch.

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No need to wait for more witnesses; proceed with impeachment

The U.S. House Intelligence Committee has done its job. It has produced evidence to persuade millions of Americans — including me — that Donald Trump deserves to be the third president to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

So, with that I believe it is time for the House Judiciary Committee to begin drafting articles of impeachment. Then then panel needs to air it out in public, take a vote and if most of panel members agree with the articles to submit them to the full House for a vote.

Donald Trump has sullied the presidency, has committed violations of his oath, has committed impeachable acts … in my view! I know, there are others who think differently, which gets me to why I believe the time has arrived to get this matter settled.

After all we heard, the Republican resistance to impeachment seemingly has stiffened. If the GOP members of the House aren’t persuaded now to impeach this criminally negligent president, then they won’t be persuaded by anyone else who could come forward.

Almost anyone who has paid attention to this matter understands that it likely will be a partisan vote to impeach Trump in the House; there might be one or two Democrats who’ll vote “no.”

There might be a House vote completed by Christmas. Then it goes to the Senate, where the GOP resistance to doing the right thing is just as fierce as it is in the House.

Trump isn’t likely to be convicted in the Senate trial. Let’s put these individuals, all 535 of them in both legislative chambers, on the record. Do they endorse impeachment or do they oppose it? Put another way, do they stand for the Constitution or do they stand for the man who occupies the office of president, who in my mind has violated his oath to defend and protect it?

We must not have this Senate trial collide with the presidential election campaign. Several members of the Senate are running for president. They need to devote their energy to their effort to win their party’s nomination. Sure, they have a duty to administer justice in an impeachment trial. Let them do that duty and then release them to the campaign trail.

When should all this be completed? Hey, let’s try for, say, Easter.

We need not drag this process out any longer.

Let’s get on with it. Then let’s have that presidential — and congressional — election.

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‘Jury tampering’ mixes with political necessity

I have laid out already the notion that the president of the United States, while launching a charm offensive with potential U.S. Senate trial “jurors,” might have committed an act of jury tampering.

However, I also am enough of a realist to understand that presidents who seek to govern effectively need to talk to legislators about the enactment of bills that become the law of the land.

Thus, Donald Trump is facing a serious governance quandary as he awaits the near-certain impeachment of him by the U.S. House of Representatives. The House then would hand it off to the Senate, which will put the president on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Trump met with GOP senators this week to talk about the impeachment trial that is sure to occur. What did he discuss? Did he seek to persuade them to stand by him? That sounds like jury tampering to me.

However, what about their legislative initiative? Or the president’s legislative agenda? Or the agendas awaiting action by Republicans and, oh yes, Democrats in the Senate?

Were the president to invite senators to the White House to discuss those issues — and stay far away from the impeachment trial that will be looming soon in the Senate — well, that would be OK with me.

That, of course, requires that the president understand how government works and how he must be able to compartmentalize the issues that lay before him. President Clinton was able to do that when the House impeached him in 1998. This president is consumed by the impeachment battle and it is getting in the way of him doing the job to which he was elected.

Sigh …

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Is this a case of ‘jury tampering’?

Hey, hold on for just a minute or maybe two!

The House of Representatives is getting ready to impeach the president of the United States in connection with allegations that he solicited a personal political favor from a foreign government. Once the House approves the impeachment articles, the matters goes to the Senate, which then will have a trial.

Why, then, is Donald Trump schmoozing with “jurors” who will have to weigh the evidence presented to them and decide whether to convict him of assorted high crimes and misdemeanors.

Trump launched a charm offensive by inviting some Republican senators to the White House. He talked with them — privately, of course. Some of those GOP lawmakers include at least a couple of them who might be inclined to want to convict the president. I refer to Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine. Hey, there might be a lame-duck GOP senator in the mix, too.

I know it’s not a fully legal proceeding that the Senate will launch. It’s a political one, steeped in partisanship. However, some legal principles are brought into play here. One of them surely must be this quaint idea that “defendants” shouldn’t “tamper” with the jury pool.

The Senate’s 100 members are going to serve as jurors in this upcoming trial. The Republican members need not hear sweet nothings whispered into their ears by the Republican president whose conduct in office has brought us to this sorry and sad chapter of our nation’s political life.

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After impeachment, then what? An election!

I am quite able to accept the notion that once the House impeaches Donald Trump over abuse of power, violation of his oath, bribery, extortion and assorted other high crimes and misdemeanors that the Senate is likely to keep him in office.

Then what?

The president can campaign for re-election in 2020 as the only individual ever to seek a second term under the cloud of impeachment. How do you think that will play?

It then likely would fall on whoever runs against him to make the case that Trump encompasses, in fact, all the traits laid out in the articles of impeachment. He is ignorant of government; he is self-serving, self-aggrandizing and self-indulgent; he denigrates dedicated public servants; he is corrupt to the core.

Is that what we want in our president, in our head of state, in our commander in chief? Of course not! Then again, I don’t need to be persuaded of any of it. I have believed it since the moment the Reality TV Celebrity in Chief rode down the Trump Tower escalator and declared (a) that he would run for president and that (b) Mexicans are rapists, drug dealers and murderers.

Perhaps the speaker of the House was right all along. Trump won’t be kicked out of office by a Senate conviction because the GOP majority lacks the courage to do the right thing; so it falls on the voters to remove him on Nov. 3, 2020 when they cast their ballots for president.

The impeachment inquiry is going to lead to an impeachment. I have reversed myself on that matter. It should proceed. I have heard enough from the witnesses who have talked publicly to the House Intelligence Committee.

Donald Trump is even more unfit for the presidency than he was when he entered the 2016 campaign. He needs to be defeated. Trump needs to evicted from the White House and sent home to Mar-a-Lago, where his heart has belonged all along anyway.

I say this believing that Senate Republicans will hold firm against the tide that will impeach the president. That’s my view today.

There well might be a glimmer of hope, though, that lightning will strike and that GOP senators can be persuaded by their “bosses” at home that they need to suck it up, step up and stand for the Constitution they took an oath to protect and defend.

It’s only a glimmer but … one never knows.

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Founders had it right when they set POTUS removal bar so high

The nation’s founding fathers did a masterful job of laying out a two-step process for removing a president of the United States from office.

Impeachment is the easy part. It requires a simple majority in the House of Representatives to effectively indict the president for crimes against the nation. The current House appears poised to impeach Donald Trump on at least two counts involving abuse of power and violating his oath of office.

Conviction in the Senate is the hard part. The founders decided that two-thirds of the Senate need to convict a president who stands trial in the upper legislative chamber. The current Senate appears set to keep Trump in office. Why? Because two-thirds of its members won’t vote to convict Trump of the charges that the House will bring to them. And why is that? Because Republicans occupy 53 of the 100 seats; a conviction would require a flip of about 20 GOP seats to convict Trump. It won’t happen.

But here’s another scenario that appears quite possible if not likely.

Most of the senators might actually vote to convict Trump. There might be, say, 51 or 52 Senate votes to remove Trump from office. That’s not nearly enough to force him out of the White House. It is, though, enough of a stain on Trump’s term as president to persuade votes in November 2020 to cast him aside.

There actually might be enough voters in key states who would say, in effect: I cannot support a president who has been found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by most of the members of the U.S. Senate. 

Now, Trump likely will be able to say he avoided conviction in the Senate. A majority vote to convict him — even one that fails to clear the high bar the founders set — does not allow him to declare himself “acquitted.”

The drama well could produce a nail-biter and set up the most astonishing presidential campaign theme in our nation’s history.

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Chairman Schiff: master of the obvious

I am left with a simple response to U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s assertion that an impeachment of Donald Trump could result in his acquittal.

My response? Well … duh!

I think Chairman Schiff is on the right side of this dispute with the president. I want him removed from office as much as Schiff does. Maybe more so.

However, the prospect of a Senate acquittal is precisely the deterrent that prevents House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from charging full speed toward impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.

To that end, Schiff didn’t provide much insight into what I believe is patently obvious. The House impeachment means the Senate would put the president on trial. Democrats control the House; Republicans run the Senate. Congressional Democrats despise the president and stand solidly behind the idea that he has committed impeachable offenses; Congressional Republicans stand just as solidly behind the president.

A Senate conviction requires 67 votes among senators. The GOP occupies 53 out of 100 Senate seats. Do the math. Do you believe there’s a hope — at this moment, at least — of getting any Senate Republicans to convict the president?

That circles me back to Schiff’s comment on “Meet the Press.”

An acquittal could strengthen Donald Trump’s political hand. Pelosi is an astute politician who knows the stakes involved in handing Trump a political victory. She can blather all she wants about doing her “constitutional duty,” but she also is weighing the political component. For the House to impeach this president and then hand this matter over to another legislative body that adheres to a form of slovenly fealty to the president would be disastrous.

Congressional Republicans do not care about the mountain of evidence that tells them Donald Trump has obstructed justice multiple times during special counsel Robert Mueller’s quest for the truth behind the Russian hacking of our election in 2016.

It boils down to that undeniable fact of political life.