Impeachment Today: Will a Senate Trial Happen?
The conventional wisdom about the future of any articles of impeachment passed by the House of Representatives has been that they would be dead on arrival at the Senate.
By hook or by crook --or both-- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to either run a “show trial” aimed at besmirching the president’s accusers or ignore evidence gathered by the House and proclaiming him to be innocent.
Recent developments have cast doubt on what courses of action will be available in the upper chamber.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has laid out a detailed proposal for a Senate trial including subpoenas for documents the White House has withheld and witnesses it has prevented from testifying.
As Laura Clawson at Daily Kos explains:
Schumer’s proposal broadly follows the timeline of the Clinton impeachment trial, with House impeachment managers and Trump’s defense team each getting 24 hours to make their case and 16 hours of questions from senators. Witnesses would give up to eight hours of testimony each. McConnell would prefer to avoid witnesses at all, while Donald Trump has suggested he’d like to turn the trial into a circus by demanding witnesses like Hunter Biden and the original whistleblower, whose testimony would be irrelevant since it’s been so fully corroborated by people who actually witnessed the events in question.
The House Judiciary Committee’s report makes clear why impeachment is so critical, because ”We cannot rely on the next election as a remedy for presidential misconduct when the president is seeking to threaten the very integrity of that election.” But that, of course, is one of the reasons Republicans are so determined to protect Trump. It’s that will to power that’s why Sen. Lindsey Graham says “I clearly made up my mind. I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations in the process.”
So what happens if, Moscow Mitch McConnell refuses to play nice?
Nixon’s former attorney John Dean, and legal scholar Lawrence Tribe have suggested it’s possible for the House of Representatives to vote affirmatively on the articles on impeachment but NOT send them to the Senate for a trial. And Senator Schumer isn’t saying no to the idea.
Here’s columnist Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Dean is not alone in suggesting this. There’s a growing sense among those who believe that Congress has a duty -- both to the American people and to future presidents -- to call out high crimes and misdemeanors that impeachment is actually the be-all-and-end-all sanction, considering that a kangaroo court awaits in McConnell’s Senate. Indeed, people with access to Trump say that -- while he believes impeachment will help him in the 2020 campaign (and he may be right) -- he also sees the looming vote as a huge humiliation. As it should be.
But if the realistic goal of impeachment is not to remove Trump from office but to define both his legacy and the limits of presidential power for the history textbooks, it should also be more thorough and all-inclusive, Thus, Dean’s rallying cry to “Keep investigating!” I agree. For example, not impeaching Trump for his massive violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments clause -- an issue that’s been dropped in the race to a Ukraine impeachment -- might make it easier for future presidents to profit off the vast power of the White House.
https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1206561383212556288?s=20
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Another argument popular in Trumpian circles is that the President must have committed actual crimes to be impeached.
So the House Judiciary Committee has obliged those doubters with a 169-page assessment of the case for Trump’s removal from office, contending the president committed “multiple federal crimes” including criminal bribery and wire fraud.
Here’s Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:
The case the report makes is as follows. Federal statute makes “bribery” a crime if a public official “demands” or “seeks” anything “of value personally,” in return for performing “an official act,” and all of this has been done “corruptly.”
The report notes that Trump’s plot fits all these criteria. Trump sought announcements of investigations that would smear a political rival and help absolve Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage on his behalf. Trump directly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do this, and numerous texts show U.S. ambassadors negotiating with Ukraine for a statement announcing it, which was confirmed by testimony from ringleader Gordon Sondland and others.
Those were “things of value” to Trump. His own lawyer Rudolph Giuliani openly said they would be “very helpful” to Trump himself. And we know from those texts and from extensive testimony that Trump conditioned two official acts — a White House meeting and the granting of military aid — on getting those things of value.
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This…
https://twitter.com/B52Malmet/status/1206554100986454016?s=20
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