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Republicans: Let’s Get This Show on the Road!
We have entered a new year. I, for one, want to start with a fresh outlook, regardless of my tendency to assume the worst when it comes to politics. I think that breaking through the stand-off regarding the impeachment of Donald Trump could start a tidal shift in the power of the Republicans. I’m calling out Mitch McConnell to disregard any demands by the Democrats, rally the Republicans, and get this show on the road!
In a previous post, I explained some of the requirements, or lack of them, for impeachment. The articles of impeachment have essentially been delivered (by public announcement); the trial can proceed whether Pelosi appoints Managers or not; and there do not have to be witnesses. These points make up the crux of the stalemate:
This is not a criminal trial. The Democrats are demanding the processes of a criminal trial, and yet they refused to follow those types of procedures in their own investigation.
They can’t have it both ways; no acrobatics they try will make it a criminal trial. So, all of the demands they are making go out the window.
The trial must be fair and impartial—Senators take an oath that they will “do impartial justice,” but technically declaring they’ve made up their minds doesn’t contradict that statement. Mitch McConnell has declared that he is not impartial at all, and Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor responds:
‘In the past,’ Bowman said, ‘senators try to maintain at least the fiction of impartiality, to maintain at least the notion that they could be persuaded. What we have with McConnell … is essentially a statement that there’s nothing you can do that’s going to persuade us: We’re the president’s men and women, and he’s going to stay in office.’
Democrats may see this as brazen, but it’s not unconstitutional.
In a criminal trial, lawyers probably would keep someone off the jury if he declared as little impartiality as McConnell.
In an impeachment trial, senators can’t be disqualified if they express bias. That makes sense, Bowman said. Otherwise, ‘the majority will just disqualify the minority and you have this sort of bizarre free-for-all, with six people left standing. It will be silly.’
So Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi can call it “unfair” all they want, but it’s a meaningless charge. This impeachment is not a criminal process.
Nancy Pelosi is making demands about the rules the Senate should make for the trial—just as the House made its own rules for the impeachment process, the Senate has sole authority to make rules for the trial process. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Due process, which the President has been demanding, does not apply to an impeachment–Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, explains due process in this way:
The Fifth Amendment says no one can be deprived of ‘life, liberty or property’ without due process of law. A president facing an impeachment trial is not at risk of losing life, liberty or property.
Congress ‘is not obliged to follow due process, (though) it may well decide to provide things that look like due process,’ Gerhardt said.
Due process, at a minimum, requires an impartial decision-maker. ‘You can see how that doesn’t really apply to impeachment,’ he said.
I’m sure the President is frustrated by this fact, and he may already know he has no grounds to stand on; I hope his protest is just part of his “show.” This is not a criminal trial.
I understand that Mitch McConnell might choose to wait until the Christmas break has ended. Beyond that date, I see more negatives than positives for allowing Nancy Pelosi to drag out delivering the articles.
If she waits—she could deliver them right before the election, and hope to affect the results. She could drive Donald Trump crazy (which I believe gives her a certain level of satisfaction); you can say that his protests are theater, but I think he wants this thing done.
If she continues to demand to have input to the Senate rules—there is no good reason for McConnell to acquiesce. None.
If McConnell moves forward after the Christmas break—he can give Pelosi three days to deliver the articles, and if she doesn’t, he has many ways of appointing managers to acquire them or even proceed without them. He should forget about bringing in witnesses as part of the trial. He should either set limits to how long the attorneys can take to present their sides or dismiss the entire case.
(Other investigations can be scheduled to depose all the people they wish to interview about the last four years; those people don’t need to be part of the trial.)
Then the Senate should vote.
The Republicans can use this moment as a launching pad for an assertive and determined beginning to the year. It’s time to put impeachment behind us: the sooner, the better!
Published in Politics
Your advice is spot on. Mitch is a master parliamentarian. Sometimes that is great and sometimes it comes across as dithering. This is no time for dithering.
I wonder if he could actually schedule the trial while they’re in recess? I assume not, thus recommending he takes action when they all return.
He should have claimed to be just as impartial as Robert Mueller and the other neutral investigators whose only interest is in the unbiased truth.
At a minimum, McConnell should be able to announce how long he will wait for Pelosi to formally deliver the articles.
If the Senate proceeds without cooperation from Pelosi, the disposition should include a Senate statement of posture that deters any new baseless impeachments. The impeachment process should not be solely political.
Great point, @bobthompson. How would the Republicans deter those efforts? I can’t bear the idea of further impeachment efforts into Trump’s second term (which I’m hoping is imminent).
I don’t think it requires a form beyond a strong statement accompanying the disposition (I’m assuming this disposition is going to demonstrate clearly that the voted impeachment was inappropriate) that totally political impeachments are a waste of the peoples’ Congressional function and time and will only get the same result as this one.
Some Republican congressmen involved in the House hearings have said that the swing district and ‘blue dog’ House Democrats were threatened by Democrat leadership if they did not vote for impeachment. If the present impeachment is disposed of in a manner similar to what I described earlier, then it’s really doubtful that all those votes would be for impeachment again before the 2020 election in the absence of a provable crime as Constitutionally defined. This might say no further unjustified attempts this term.
I think you’re probably right, Bob. But Pelosi has a lot of power; how far will people go to defy her?
Many people already have thought Pelosi was on the edge of acting stupidly with this impeachment, particularly after her initial statements about the process needing to be bipartisan. That won’t get better.
This is 2020. Happy New Year! It is not September of 1787, when the Constitution was signed. There is no need for anyone to put any documents into Mitch McConnell’s welcoming hands. I just popped open The Congressional Record on this thing called the world wide web. Well I don’t pay enough dues to Ricochet to paste the entire 100’s of pages (who writes these things?), but I sure can do the ‘ole linky. Please do click on me. The Articles of Impeachment and the vote in their entirety are already a part of our nation’s documented history. Mitch McConnell needs nothing more from the House of Representatives to do his Constitutional duty as Majority Leader of the Senate. What he does need, is to do that duty immediately. The House held the trial. They called their witnesses and presented their case. The Senate is the jury. They need call no more witnesses. If they have any questions, they may pass those on to Chief Justice Roberts. The answers should come forth quickly. Then the jurors (Senators) must vote, guilty or innocent. If 67 of them find President Trump guilty, he will be removed from office. Otherwise, we have multitudes of problems needing to be solved for us citizens. As Susan says, “Let’s get this show on the road.”
All well said, @cdor. There is real work to be done–let’s do it!
There are a lot of differing interests here, in terms of what Pelosi wants/needs to do with her swing district reps and the hard-core ones, and what McConnell either wants to or needs to do with the Senate trial schedule.
I forget which podcast talked about it, but someone brought up the idea that Pelosi could simply try to hold the resolutions up for not just 2020, but pocket them for future use into the 2021-24 period if Trump were to be re-elected, and pull them out if the Democrats took over the Senate. Which from a PR standpoint would seem to be crazy, though the Clinton impeachment showed action taken by one Congress could be continued by its successor, since the House impeached in the 105th Congress and the Senate voted against conviction in the 106th. But it’s something the hard-core types would be fine with (and the main argument for those saying Pelosi acted against her best interests was she did it in order to avoid primary challenges from the left to swing district Dems in 2020, because she knew far left candidates might win the primaries there, but would be more likely to lose in the general election).
If Nancy does want to stretch this out in some hope she and her media backers can convince the public the Senate is simply giving Trump a free pass, McConnell can sort of call her bluff by just deeming passage to be the same as presentation and holding the trial whether or not Pelosi presents the articles. In that case, you could have Senate Democrats threatening to boycott the trial, which would be a Constitutional violation (and at the same time, the interests of Trump, Warren. Sanders and even Klobuchar could be in sync here — Trump still may think Biden’s his biggest threat, and those senators don’t want wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe or even Buttigieg out on the campaign trail by themselves in late January and February. So they might all want McConnell to do a rocket docket impeachment trial).
I think we need to move forward. Hold the trial. BTW, I read somewhere that any Senator that doesn’t show up can be thrown in jail. It doesn’t make an allowance for those who just feel like they don’t want to be there.
If any Democrat fails to show they are just making it harder to get to 2/3 for removal. Someone floated an analysis a little while back that the constitution requires that the vote be 2/3 of the senators present and that if enough impeachment sympathetic Republicans stayed away they could support removal without even voting.
How does that disprove Nancy’s point? Seems to sort of support it.
It’s a truism that the whole thing is political theatre, but since it’s playing to the electorate more than anything else it would seem wise to take that into account?
We can’t seem to win either way, @zafar, no matter what we do. The Dems will criticize us for any steps we take. I’m tired of the Republicans being held hostage by the Dems and the biased media. I have no problem doing the right thing, but the Dems don’t get to decide what that is.
A fair point, Susan, but also: the voters will decide whether the Republicans did the right thing or not, and that’ll be relevant.
This whole “delivery” line is a sham. The senators know exactly what was voted upon. Indeed, they already have notice of the actual articles of impeachment that were passed by the House:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/755/text
I pasted the web address in this way to make clear the very public and official location of the articles of impeachment. Here is the precise status of the bill, showing the House has taken the final vote:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/755
McConnell should simply take notice of this and should also publicly embrace Susan Collins’ recommendation that the Senate use the same rules as in the Clinton trial. That is, Republicans should do with their own party’s president as they did with the opposition party’s president: apply one set of rules to both.
Actually, I think we win almost any way this plays out. About the only way we lose is if the Senate decides to wait indefinitely, without comment, for the House to do whatever it feels like doing. That would be a mistake, but a wholly unnecessary one. Pretty much any other path that fulfills the Senate’s Constitutional duty would seem to be a winner for the Republicans, as long as followed without drama.
Yes, @zafar, they’ll decide, but as @henryracette points out, they can’t complain if the Republicans just carry out the Constitution; the Republicans also need to find a way to educate the public on what it’s doing. Very little is written about precisely how it should be done. And as @cliffordbrown points out, however, there is a precedent that can be followed. I believe the Clinton impeachment criteria had bi-partisan agreements on how the trial was conducted, and I don’t think that’s going to happen this time.
That’s where the Democrats are hoping media help will create public pressure to force McConnell to negotiate with Schumer — the betting is they can do a better job of claiming McConnell is dismissing the impeachment case out of hand than McConnell’s going to be able to claim Pelosi and the other Democrats are not serious about impeachment, because of the non-specificity of the charges and the fact that the urgent need to impeach in December has suddenly flipped to slow-walking the charges over from the House to the Senate.
The only strategic grounds for delay here would be if Republicans think they can pick up/retain some Senate seats by moving the trial closer to the election. But the news cycle runs so fast nowadays you’d have to drag it out all the way past the conventions to get any sort of effect, and you’d be in danger of losing the current public perception that House Democrats more than Senate Republicans are the ones playing games with the impeachment process.
Pelosi probably figured that whatever taint they have attached to Trump will not increase if the Senate gets to control the trial. So why bother if the House passage is going to be the high water mark of a purely partisan scheme. It is all downhill from here:
The temporary Dem strategy appears to be to say there is actually more evidence out there but White House obstruction and the inevitable Senate dismissal makes it pointless to deliver the articles of impeachment even though Orange Man Bad.
Absolutely no one will be persuaded from their current partisan stance by anything the Senate does or does not do. If anything, the fierce impeachment-indifference of the center majority will intensify.
It will be far more effective for the GOP to highlight the Russian Collusion Lite nature of this Ukrainian farce to hold hearings in parallel to and in support of Durham than it would be to try to wedge that content into an impeachment trial.
The long-awaited counterattack against the coup attempt cannot be dismissed by the left/MSM as a disingenuous attempt to deflect from the impeachment allegations if the impeachment has been dismissed or dispensed with as expeditiously as it deserves. More reason for Pelosi to stall, as if the impeachment vote itself outweighs the sheer criminality of those who engineered the Russian/Ukrainian lies to undo an election.
I disagree with moving on the impeachment prior to it being delivered. I think the Senate should treat this impeachment with as much contempt as possible. McConnell should declare that no impeachment article was delivered and thus he is pleased, or perhaps just ignore the whole thing completely. Let them stew. If they do deliver the articles, they should be received with much contempt and the “managers” should not be allowed to speak. They should be escorted into the Senate Chamber by security and then immediately escorted back out without speaking. Then the Senate should immediately vote to dismiss the impeachment summarily, i.e., without debate of any sort. That’s how to handle it. McConnell can then orate about the process the House followed being grotesque and an insult to American values. Schumer will complain, but will have already lost.
In no circumstance should this ever get to an evidentiary hearing because the democrats will do to Trump what they tried to do to Kavanaugh: They will bring in new witnesses that have nothing to do with the articles of impeachment and those witnesses will tell incredible lies of the most salacious kind. There is no penalty for perjury in Senate hearings, so we’ve seen, so what’s to deter them?
The Dems only have PR, and their objective is power, wherever and however they can get it. It’s the way interests have always worked. Since we have the only consistently substantive ideas on the table, we should play our founding ideas to the hilt, always but also always point out how their ideas lack firmness, bottom, consistency, tradition, history, substance or honesty. Point out all their changes, the worst folks who held such ideas in history, where their latest hypocrisy comes from and why they had to pretend to change. Hit them so hard they have to change themes again and again. We don’t have to change ordinary Democrats, just help them understand that Washington is the problem.
Mostly in agreement with you @skyler but think McConnel should force the issue and not wait for Pelosi. Give her deadline to name House managers and formally deliver Articles, if not delivered by deadline, Senate will “Deem” them passed and will adjudicate matter based upon articles and testimony as has been recorded.
I’m hoping that McConnel, being a stickler for process and precedent, recognizes that putting this down quickly and unceremoniously will PREVENT this kind of partisanship from becoming a common occurrence with future Congresses and Presidents.
The Dems crossed this Rubicon, it is critical that it any advantage they think they might have gained (time to dredge up more “explosive!” information, witnesses, additional Articles of Impeachment…) be thwarted.
Make them start all over again. If they include the same nebulous charges, reject again on ‘Double Jeopardy’ grounds. The Dems set a horrible precedent here, the GOP needs to set a humiliating and painful one in response.
I think I would say res judicata rather than double jeopardy. It seems more appropriate for a civil action and the trial is not a criminal trial.
I was going to comment on a few points, but this last is the most salient.
Assuming a trial, and an acquittal, the likely result, and impeachment is behind us, for now, then what?
Is Trump vindicated? Does he claim victory? Most likely. Is Trump now even more unfettered by the norms of the political process and constitutional authority?
Pres. Trump does not have an affinity for the constitution and Article II. He has operated more along the lines of Pres. Obama with a “pen and a cell phone”. His threat to step into California’s homeless crisis is an example, where the federal government has no such authority.
Would McConnell give Pres. Trump his own quid pro quo? “We will acquit you if you promise to do such and such (e.g. no more tweets)”. I suspect this is not the case.
So we move on (remember why there is a MoveOn.org?), will government become more effective? Will the national partisanship divide lessen? Will we, as a country, be in a better place to face the challenges of the world?
I just don’t see any improvement. The media and dems will still be hostile, Pres. Trump will remain hostile to the media and dems. And is Trump even capable of moving forward?
@billnelson I could not disagree more vigorously. He has not violated any court orders. He has offered deals to Congress that the Dems declined. He has used executive power lawfully (and refrained when enjoined by the courts) and only when Congress refused to address national security problems.
Lots of questions—no answers.
This impeachment was an entirely partisanship endeavor. The Democrats don’t like President Trump. Gee, I didn’t know that. It deserves nothing less than an entirely partisan dismissal. Guess what, the Republican DO like Trump. “Then what?”, you ask. Well then, we continue thriving with our economy, getting stronger with our military, supporting our allies, negotiating better trade relations, constitutionally removing more burdensome regulations, and , in less than a year, we VOTE. Yes, the people vote on who they want for President–NOT just the Democrat members of the House of Representatives. Are you bothered by that, @Bill Nelson? I hope not. Ha!