By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

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.

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

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.