There’s a good bit more time to go, but I feel the need to offer a brief comment on what is unfolding on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
I am listening to the U.S. House managers make their case that Donald J. Trump incited an insurrection on the Sixth of January.
To my mind and my ears — and surely to my own admitted bias — they are making the case. They are demonstrating with videos, Twitter messages and with Trump’s own rhetoric that the then-president of the United States intended for the riotous terrorist mob to derail our democratic system of government when he exhorted them to storm Capitol Hill.
I will await Trump’s legal team’s rebuttal to this compelling presentation.
This myth must be dispelled … which is that the presidential transfer from Donald Trump to Joe Biden was not the “peaceful transition of power” we all cherish about our system of government.
That transition included the infamous terrorist riot of the Sixth of January, the one that killed five people, including a Capitol Police officer who died trying to keep the mob from overpowering the Capitol Building.
So, a Senate trial is about to commence. We must never — not ever! — lose sight of what we nearly lost on that terrible day and in the weeks that preceded it. We nearly lost what arguably is the most significant positive aspect of our system of government.
We go through a presidential election every four years. They produce a winner and a loser. The winner is filled with joy and anticipation of assuming the awesome power of the office. The loser is disappointed, and understandably so. But the candidate who loses that contest usually then calls the winner, offers a word of congratulations and then pledges to “work with” the winner in continuing our national journey.
That didn’t happen in 2020. The loser bitched and moaned about phony “vote fraud” and said the election was “stolen” from him. He mounted legal challenges ad nauseum against the result; state and federal courts threw them all out.
Then we had the riot. We all witnessed the horror.
Have we lost our bragging point? Has it been consigned to some historical trash heap? No. It hasn’t. The only way we can lose it forever would be if it were to repeat itself in four years, or any time after that.
We must be mindful of what happened during this transition. It wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t orderly. President Biden took office after harvesting his vast knowledge of government to ensure that when he took over the executive branch that he had as much of his team installed and ready to go as he could.
The transition from Trump to Biden should have been peaceful. It wasn’t. Let’s not forget what we all witnessed and let us be sure we remind those who come after us about the danger that lurks when a losing presidential candidate refuses to concede that he or she has lost a free, fair and democratic election.
All is not lost for those of us who want to see Donald Trump convicted by U.S. senators for inciting an insurrection against the government he took an oath to defend and protect.
The ex-president isn’t likely to “earn” that conviction, given the cowardice that infects so many Republicans serving as jurors in the second-ever impeachment trial that begins today.
However, let us ponder something that isn’t lost on many of us: Even though the Constitution sets a high bar for conviction, there well might be enough Republican senators who no longer fear retribution from Trump and his cult of followers if they vote their conscience.
Imagine, then, a 60-40 Senate vote to convict. The Constitution requires 67 conviction votes to seal the deal. How does Trump pitch a possible political return with the stain of a potentially significant majority of senators believing he did what the House of Representatives impeached him for doing?
A number of GOP senators have announced their intention to retire from the Senate; they won’t seek re-election in 2022. The school of thought goes that Republican “jurors” fear for their political backsides if the were to cross the Trumpkins who still command the political stage in the GOP.
Sens. Pat Toomey, Richard Shelby and Rob Portman are lame ducks. Then we have Sens. Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell and possibly Mike Enzi who could jump from the GOP ship and vote to convict Trump of inciting the riotous mob of terrorists to storm Capitol Hill on the Sixth of January.
The aim no longer is to remove Trump from office. A free and fair election took care of that already. The idea now would be to keep him from running for federal office ever again.
So … I will await a likely pre-ordained outcome. Trump will be “acquitted” — or so it appears — because most of the GOP Senate caucus will stand with him. I do not expect to hear a single senator defend the conduct of the ex-president. They’ll argue that a trial is unconstitutional; I do not believe the argument will hold up.
One final point: I want a quick end to this saga. I am weary of commenting on Donald Trump. Really! I am! I want to move on. However, I want us all to remember what occurred on the Sixth of January 2021. That memory should compel us to remember who was singularly responsible for that hideous event.
May that individual, Donald John Trump, cope with the indelible stain it will leave on what is left of his legacy.
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.
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.
Donald J. Trump reportedly hates to be referred to as a “former president.”
He bases his loathing of the term because, it seems, that he cannot accept that Joe Biden is the current president. We only have one of ’em at a time, correct?
That’s fine with me. I never referred to him directly with the term “President” preceding his name. It doesn’t bother me in the least that he hates the term “former president.”
I’ll go one better on Trump. From now on I won’t use the term “former president” when referencing him. Ever again. He’ll just be “Trump” or “Donald Trump” or “The Donald.” I might even throw in a more, um, descriptive term on occasion.
“I’d rather not speculate out loud. I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
That about sums it up. President Biden has declared that Donald J. Trump, his immediate predecessor, won’t get intelligence briefings.
Indeed, what is the point of giving this information to someone who placed so little value on the daily presidential briefings to which he was entitled when he held the office? None, as far as anyone can tell.
It’s usually customary to give immediate past presidents these briefings. It is meant as a courtesy to the individual who had immediate access to the most sensitive information in the country until the moment he left the presidency.
Trump, though, has engaged in some of the most hideous behavior imaginable since losing his re-election bid in 2020. He has not — and may never — accepted the results of the election. He has not yet congratulated President Biden specifically.
And, of course, he egged on the terrorist mob to storm Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. We know what happened on that terrible day.
Give him presidential intelligence briefings? No way, man.
This likely is the biggest non-surprise of the lead-up to next week’s impeachment trial of Donald John Trump.
It is that Trump won’t testify in his own defense on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Democratic House trial managers had summoned the former president to testify in the trial that will determine whether he committed “incitement of insurrection,” as spelled out by the U.S. House of Representatives impeachment.
Why won’t Trump testify? My strong guess is that he would have to swear to tell the “whole truth” to the Senate that will act as jurors. The trial managers would have put Trump under oath to tell the truth. Failure to do so would result in perjury, which is a criminal offense.
Do you get where I am going with this? If not, here it is: This individual cannot tell the truth! He is incapable or unwilling to tell the truth, even under threat of criminal punishment.
The evidence of what Trump did on Jan. 6 has been recorded for posterity. He stood before a mob of terrorist rioters and told them to march on Capitol Hill to “take back our country.” They must not act out of weakness, the president said. The terrorists took him at his word and stormed into the Capitol Building to stop the certification of the 2020 election, which Congress was in the process of doing.
The mob killed five people, including a Capitol Police officer. They shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” while looking for the vice president. They shouted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
They acted on the instigation of Donald Trump.
My lingering thought is: How does Trump defend his conduct?
Defending the indefensible is too steep a hill to climb, especially for a pathological liar who would have to swear to tell the truth.
Donald Trump’s time in public office has resulted in many seemingly impossible events.
Such as turning me — an unabashed center/lefty — into a fan of a right-wing politician who, in this instance, is Liz Cheney.
Cheney is a Republican House member from Wyoming. She’s No. 3 on the GOP congressional leadership chart. She voted on Jan. 13 to impeach Donald Trump, deciding that Trump’s incitement of an insurrection was too much for her … and for the nation.
Rep. Cheney is right. Trump was as wrong as wrong can be to bellow his encouragement for the riotous mob to march on Jan. 6 on Capitol Hill to “take back our country.”
Cheney is now the target of Trumpkin Corps members among her colleagues in the House. They want to remove Cheney from her leadership post. The House GOP caucus, though, decided overwhelmingly to keep her in that position. Good for them.
Good also for Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution.
