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“The Senate voted on Tuesday to proceed with the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump… The vote came after an afternoon of arguments in which Democrats argued that the trial was on solid legal footing and that the Constitution didn’t include a ‘January exception’ that would allow presidents to go unpunished for improper actions in the final weeks of their tenure. Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered that the Senate can’t try Mr. Trump because he is now a private citizen and that the effort was politically motivated.” Wall Street Journal
Watch the impeachment trial here. C-Span
The right is skeptical of the impeachment effort.
“There is a real sense in which none of this matters, of course. Trump's acquittal in a few days' time is not remotely in doubt. The opening statements for both sides are rhetorical gestures that are not even ostensibly meant to persuade Senate jurors to vote for or against conviction…
“Still, I have no idea what Castor and Schoen were doing Tuesday afternoon. Trump would have been better served having the My Pillow guy give a two-hour infomercial or having Ted Nugent perform ‘Wang Dang Sweet Poontang’ live on the Senate floor. While I have come around to the view that the Constitution allows non-seated politicians to be subject to impeachment proceedings and that removal from office and disqualification are distinct penalties, the opposite argument is equally respectable. Any number of qualified lawyers could have made it on behalf of the former president…
“[Instead] Trump hired two flunkies who made the ‘Stop the Steal’ dream team of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell look like Johnny Cochran and Carl Douglas.”
Matthew Walther, The Week
“For the third time in the last three impeachments, the House has sent articles of impeachment over on an almost entirely partisan vote with no hope of gaining a conviction in the Senate. It’s time to accept that this is just how it works. Impeachment is the way for the majority in the House to express its formal disapproval of abuses of power by the president of the opposing party…
“A past barrier to impeachment was how momentous it seemed. But if the House can vote out a sloppily written article in an afternoon and the Senate can hold an abbreviated trial without interfering much with its other business, the barrier to entry isn’t high. Impeachment is probably inherently a more partisan exercise than a censure, because the president’s party can point to the theoretical stakes involved in removal or disqualification as a reason not to impeach or convict, but the two forms of disapproval — impeachment and censure — are looking less and less distinguishable.”
Rich Lowry, National Review
“Trump is a private citizen in Florida, Joe Biden sits in the Oval Office and acquittal is rightly a foregone conclusion. The smart idea would be to call the whole thing off, on both constitutional grounds and common sense. As I have said, Trump’s speech to the enormous rally on Jan. 6 was reckless in that it was too angry and too bitter. But there is no honest way to conclude he intended to incite the Capitol invasion and riot…
“The real question, then, is why Dems are putting the nation through the exercise again, just a year and five days after Trump was acquitted the first time… Having beaten him once, you might think the Dems would no longer be afraid of Trump. But they are, which is why they are desperate to keep him off the 2024 ballot.”
Michael Goodwin, New York Post
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) writes, “On the merits, President Trump’s conduct does not come close to meeting the legal standard for incitement—the only charge brought against him. His rhetoric was at times over-heated, and I wish it were not, but he did not urge anyone to commit acts of violence. And if generic exhortations to ‘fight’ or ‘win’ or ‘take back our country’ are now indictable, well, be prepared to arrest every candidate who’s ever run for office or given a stump speech…
“Repeatedly over the past four years, multiple Democrats have engaged in incendiary rhetoric and encouraged civil unrest, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi who expressly compared law enforcement to Nazis, Rep. Waters, who emphatically encouraged a campaign of intimidation and harassment of political opponents, Sen. Schumer, who made threats—by name—to ‘release the whirlwind’ against two sitting justices of the Supreme Court, and then-Sen. Harris, who actively campaigned to provide financial support, in the form of bail, for rioters last summer even after hundreds of law enforcement officers were injured and many people, including retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, were brutally murdered…
“There is no coherent rationale that renders President Trump’s remarks ‘incitement,’ and somehow exonerates the angry rhetoric of countless Democrats.”
Ted Cruz, Fox News
“You’d hope that Trump’s team could make some better arguments going forward… Trump has one, big rock solid argument in his favor. The only direct ‘order’ he gave the day of the riot at the Capitol was for people to go protest ‘peacefully.’ That should be the cornerstone of his defense along with presenting evidence that the attacks were long pre-planned and not some spontaneous response to Trump’s words.”
Bonchie, RedState
The left supports the impeachment effort.
The left supports the impeachment effort.
“The invaders ransacking senators’ desks on the Senate floor. (‘There’s gotta be something in here we can f---ing use against these scumbags.’) An officer firing a lethal shot as an insurrectionist broke through the last barrier — doors held closed by a makeshift barricade of chairs — separating the mob from lawmakers hiding on floors, under desks…
“An insurrectionist showing off the makeshift noose and gallows he made outside the Capitol, where Confederate flags and Trump banners flew. Retreating officers, overrun, being taunted by the invaders: ‘There’s a f---ing million of us out there. And we are listening to Trump — your boss.’…
“[It was] reported that several of Trump’s fiercest defenders in the Senate didn’t watch the video Raskin played… They could avert their gaze, but could they shut their ears to the bloodcurdling shouts and chants of the mob as they rampaged through the seat of American democracy?”
Dana Milbank, Washington Post
“Trump’s speech [on January 6th seems] to lend permission to his supporters to do whatever is necessary to stop the election theft. ‘You can’t vote on fraud and fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it?’ Trump said. ‘When you catch somebody in fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.’ He then urges Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally declare that the election had been fraudulent and so Trump should be the victor. ‘If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,’ Trump adds. He again tells the crowd that ‘we’re going to the Capitol’ to give ‘weak Republicans … the pride and boldness they need to take back our country.’”
Jeremy Stahl, Slate
“[Trump’s lawyers] argue in their filings that because Trump called upon supporters to ‘peacefully’ make their voices heard, this negates his other exhortations to lawlessness… Trump had for weeks been encouraging supporters to arrive at the Capitol on January 6, tweeting ‘Be there, will be wild!’ Trump's isolated request for peacefulness cannot un-ring the bell…
“The insurrectionists themselves have told law enforcement officers that they were ‘merely following the directions of then-President Trump,’ as did a man accused of discharging a fire extinguisher at police…
“Trump's defense will argue that Trump's exhortations were not, in fact, calling for actual lawlessness. They were figures of speech. While it is true that the word ‘fight’ can be used figuratively, the context here is critical. In this case, for the crowd gathered before then-President Trump to make good on his exhortation to ‘stop the steal’ — there was literally only one way to effectuate this call to action: to impede the counting of electoral votes that would shortly occur in the Capitol. After months of whipping his followers into a frenzy, his message on January 6 was perfectly clear.”
Norman Eisen and Katie Reisner, CNN
“[Trump’s lawyer David] Schoen insisted again and again that a post-term impeachment trial was illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, unprofessional, ultra vires, and possibly even ultraviolet—and yet never once mentioned that one such trial had already happened and been accepted by the Senate at the time as valid…
“Meanwhile, the House managers presented a learned case, based in history, establishing that the authors of the state and federal constitutions of the 1780s agreed that an impeachment begun when an official held office could be continued if it was not yet finished before that official left. The House managers quoted the debate over Belknap, and other precedents, all underscoring the words of former President John Quincy Adams: ‘I hold myself, so long as I have the breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office.’”
David Frum, The Atlantic
“The core of Raskin’s case for the constitutionality of trying a former president—which the Senate had to affirm for the trial to proceed—was that if senators voted against holding the trial, they’d create a ‘January exception’ to the rule of law, under which outgoing presidents could effectively run amok in their last weeks in office without fear of consequences…
“The most telling of [the House managers’] citations, I thought, was that of framer George Mason… who said that he and his fellow drafters of the Constitution should look to the British Parliament’s impeachment and conviction of Warren Hastings as a model for their own impeachment clauses. Hastings, as Mason pointed out and his co-authors knew very well, had been impeached two years after he’d stepped down from his post as a leading British official in colonial India.”
Harold Meyerson, American Prospect
