Monday, February 15, 2021

AMERICAN WINTER

Victims of violent crimes generally tend to avoid week-long visits to the scenes of the crimes that victimized them.  Especially mere weeks after the crimes have occurred.  The violations are fresh, the post-traumatic stress real.  

The better venue at that point is a therapist's couch.

As opposed to the criminal's stage.

This was not an option in the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

The scene of the crime -- the US Capitol and its Senate chamber -- was the courtroom.  Victims of the crime -- the Senators themselves -- were the jurors.  Other victims -- the House managers presenting the case for conviction -- were the prosecutors.  And still others -- the working Congressional staffers and US Capitol police there on January 6 -- were spectators.

For all those victims, the trial became a series of reminders.

The Congress was reminded that, on January 6, it was only feet away from a violent mob bent on killing or kidnapping some of them in order to stop all of them. Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer were reminded that they were actually running into that mob -- and the uncertain fate that awaits the marriage of target with violence -- until Eugene Goodman of the Capitol police intercepted and redirected them.  Speaker Pelosi's staff was reminded that those who invaded the Speaker's offices in the hunt for their boss failed to find and attack them only because the mob couldn't breach the two closed doors behind which they lay hidden under a conference table, whispering into cell phones for police assistance.

And, sadly, at the end of the day, America was reminded that, even after the horror of January 6, the party of Lincoln is still . . .

The party of Trump. 

The single article of impeachment charged Trump with inciting insurrection. To find him guilty, at least seventeen Republicans would have had to join forty-eight Democrats and two Independents in concluding that he did so.  

That was not a heavy lift.  

In the sixteen hours they took presenting their case, the House managers laid out in meticulous detail how Trump had invited and incited the mob on January 6 to overrun the US Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College votes and certifying Joe Biden as the winner of last year's Presidential election. 

The vast majority of the evidence came from Trump's own mouth and tweets.  In the years and months leading up to last November's election, he had repeated on dozens of occasions the lie that he could lose the election only as a consequence of fraud, and in the two-plus months afterward, he repeated those and other false claims that the dead had voted, that Biden ballots had been invented, and that digital scanners had been programmed in favor of his opponent.  None of those claims were remotely credible and all of them had been repeatedly rejected either by courts that heard them or government officials who investigated them.

At the same time, on January 6, Trump urged his followers to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal". He praised Rudy Giuliani, who at the same rally had called for "trial by combat". In the past, he had praised a politician who body-slammed a journalist, rally-goers who physically attacked Trump opponents, and armed militia bent on killing a sitting governor.  In all ways, therefore, he had made it perfectly clear that, in "fighting like hell", violence was acceptable. Equally damning, once the riot started, anywhere from three to six people tried to convince him to immediately intervene and tell his supporters to stop.  He did nothing.  Instead, he enjoyed the carnage.

On January 26, forty-five Republicans voted to dismiss the impeachment case against Trump on the grounds that the Senate lacked jurisdiction because he was no longer President.  That motion was defeated and this should have been the end of the issue. Jurisdiction is a threshold question.  Once you have it, you cannot disclaim it.  In other words, once the full Senate decided it in fact had jurisdiction -- which it did in voting down the motion -- even those who voted for the motion should have decided the case solely on the basis of Trump's guilt or innocence.

That, however, was not good enough for Mitch McConnell.  

After voting to acquit, McConnell gave a speech demonstrating Trump's guilt beyond any doubt but arguing once again that the Constitution itself gave the Senate no right to hold the now ex-President accountable by convicting him on the article of impeachment.  McConnell based his claim on the views of Justice Joseph Story who in 1833 wrote the first treatise on American constitutional law and concluded in it that impeachment in fact was limited to current office holders.  

Story's position has been rejected by most scholars and previously by the Senate itself.  In fact, even Story himself was skeptical, qualifying his opinion by stating that it was subject to review by the Senate and that in any case the Senate's determination would constitute the ultimate authority on the matter.  Since then, the Senate has spoken twice on the issue, once a little less than two weeks ago in Trump's case and earlier in 1876 in the case of the impeachment of then ex-Secretary of War William Belknap.  In both instances, the Senate concluded that it had jurisdiction to try the impeachment of a former official.  In other words, it rejected McConnell's position.  

For good measure, even an ex-President, John Quincy Adams, has weighed-in on the issue.  

In 1846, while serving in the House, Adams told his colleagues that "I hold myself, so long as I have breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office."

McConnell's speech was delivered with all the gravitas he generally marshals in the performance of his official duties.  Not the same, however, could be said for many of his confreres. On trial Tuesday, Missouri’s Republican Senator Josh Hawley perched himself in the Senate gallery above the floor where all his comrades were sitting at their desks.  With his feet casually up, Hawley reviewed paperwork as the House managers below presented stark video evidence setting out Trump's months long advance of the big lie, his express instructions to the armed and dangerous mob on January 6 that they march to the Capitol and "Stop the Steal", and the mob's violent and deadly attacks on Capitol police as it overran the building. 

Hawley, who had actually saluted some of the mob on his way into the Capitol that day, was among those who earlier claimed the Senate lacked jurisdiction. As noted, most Constitutional scholars reject this view. Their principal fear is that doing so will give chief executives permission to engage in high crimes and misdemeanors -- pretty much a la Trump and his "Stop the Steal" induced riot -- so long as those high crimes occur at the end of their terms. Hawley didn’t care. With designs on the 2024 GOP nomination, he covets the Trump base. Jurisdiction was one of his political life lines.

The other was sheer idiocy.

Even after the riot on January 6, when Congress returned to complete the work Trump’s riot had interrupted, Hawley still insisted on being one of the Senate sponsors demanding that Congress refuse to count Pennsylvania's electoral votes. That effort raised ignorance of the law to an art form.  The courts had already upheld Pennsylvania's vote, as they had Michigan’s, Wisconsin's, Georgia's and Arizona's, the selected targets of Trump's putsch. Hawley’s opinion to the contrary was nonsense.

As for the rest of the GOP, they were either bored . . . 

Or insane

The bored were variously described as "struggling to stay awake" (Indiana's Sen. Mike Braun), "not paying much attention" (Iowa's Sen. Marsha Blackburn), or "doodling" (Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul).  Florida's Sen. Rick Scott was seen examining "what appeared to be a map of Southeast Asia." 

The lunatic fringe was occupied by South Carolina's Lindsey Graham. 

Following the conclusion of Wednesday's session, Sen. Graham lambasted the Capitol police, saying they hadn't used enough deadly force on the mob.  Ashli Babbit, the 35 year old Air Force veteran shot and killed as she climbed through a broken window into the Speaker's lobby, apparently needed company.  Whether that company would have included more police officers -- and not just more mobsters -- went unasked (and unanswered), but this too is the GOP way.  Their favorite fundraiser/lobbyist, the NRA, routinely endorses a bullets uber alles approach to crime, even when that approach is likely to create, as it would have on January 6 (the mobsters had guns too), more dead bodies.  

But that was Graham's take regardless.  

Memo to South Carolina voters -- aren't you tired of being on the wrong side of our (un)civil wars?

After the House managers finished their case on Thursday, Trump's ever-changing cast of attorneys put on his defense. It lasted less than three hours and consisted of three assertions -- (1) that all politicians use the word "fight" without being accused of advocating violence, and Trump hadn't done anything different; (2) that in arguing that the election was flawed, Trump was merely exercising his First Amendment rights; and (3) that those who breached the Capitol on January 6 did so of their own accord and are being criminally prosecuted.  

Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit.  

This time, however, it was just . . .

Witless.

No other President has been like Trump and Trump himself has been like no other President.  

He is sui generis, unique.

 A set of one. 

You can search the speeches of others without finding any examples of Presidents or presidential candidates telling supporters to beat up opponents or equivocating before a crowd in the face of the obvious potential for violence.  No Democrat has ever done this. Trump, however, has either been advocating or winking at violence in the service of his political goals for years.  In the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene,  he has even created elected Republican acolytes. 

You can also search the speeches of other Presidents and presidential candidates without finding any who, in the immediate aftermath of a clear electoral defeat confirmed by election officials, the national media and numerous courts, claimed that he or she won by a landslide, demanded that state officials "find votes" that did not exist, or summoned thousands so that they could march on the Capitol to stop a pro forma count that they claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, constituted theft.  

Finally, you also will never find another President who, when faced with an armed and deadly attack on the US Capitol that threatened to take out other public officials, including the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House, actually stood by, did nothing, and . . . 

Enjoyed it.  

The First Amendment neither sanctions nor excuses any of this conduct.

In the end, seven Republicans -- Senators Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Burr, Sasse, Cassidy and Toomey -- voted to convict Donald Trump.

Forty-three of their party colleagues voted "not guilty".

The seven who voted to convict will become this era's profiles in courage.  

As for the forty-three who didn’t, Chuck Schumer had the last word. Their "failure to convict Donald Trump,” he said, “will live as a vote of infamy in the history of the United States Senate.”

When the impeachment trial ended and Trump was acquited last Saturday, it wasn't the Democrats who lost.  

It was the country.

Now is the winter of our discontent.









 


No comments:

Post a Comment