Tag: Senate impeachment trial

Democrats’ impeachment case lands with a thud with GOP — but real audience is voters

The Hill logoHouse Democrats on Wednesday launched the opening arguments in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, accusing him of abusing his office in his dealings with Ukraine in ways that demand his removal.

The almost eight hours of arguments on the Senate floor — the first portion of three days of Democratic opening statements — landed like a brick with Republican senators, who quickly panned the process as a political ruse and all but announced their votes to clear Trump of any wrongdoing when the question eventually reaches the floor.

“I think we’re going to hear another two and a half days of arguments from the House Democrats, but the longer they talk at this point, the weaker their case is getting,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Continue reading.

Republican officials attacking impeachment are stumped when asked a simple question

AlterNet logoA group of Republican attorneys general sent a letter on Wednesday pleading with the Senate to reject the impeachment articles of President Donald Trump sent by the House.

They argued that both the articles of impeachment are “legally flawed and factually insufficient, as well as inherently destructive of separation of powers, the Senate should explicitly reject them to protect both the institution of the Presidency and the Constitution.”

They continued:

This partisan political effort undermines the democratic process, both now and in the future. The House unilaterally re-writes the constitution, without the people’s consent to amend it. It weaponizes a process that should only be initiated in exceedingly rare circumstances and never for partisan purposes. This purely partisan attack on President Trump will damage democracy in America in the worst possible way: it will forever weaken the separation of powers–the very edifice upon which our democracy stands.

Continue reading.

What happened in Wednesday’s Senate trial, in 5 minutes

Washington Post logoThe first day of opening arguments in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial can be divided into two consequential parts: what happened on the Senate floor and what happened off it.

Let’s start with what happened in the official trial. The clock started Wednesday on Democrats’ allotted 24 hours to argue that the Senate should convict Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) spent two of those hours laying out the broad outlines of their argument. Here’s what he said: Continue reading.

Dems unload ‘overwhelming’ impeachment case on the Senate — even as they press for more

House managers work to balance their case with urgent pleas for new witnesses and documents.

And on the first day, Democrats unleashed the flood.

One by one, the seven House impeachment prosecutors seeking President Donald Trump’s removal from office reconstructed a case against the president so dense — at times, head-scratchingly complex — that it was hard for senators new to the material to keep up.

After a lofty introduction by the House’s lead manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Democrats shed any pretense of offering a streamlined, made-for-TV version of events meant to captivate the Senate or the nation. For much of the day, they cast aside any attempt to make a narrowly tailored case to Republicans that they should support calls for additional witnesses. Continue reading.

Mitch McConnell has failed the Republican Party

Washington Post logoWorld War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Two days later, the governments of Britain and France honored their diplomatic vows to Warsaw by declaring war on Adolf Hitler’s invading armies. As historian Jean Edward Smith noted in “The Liberation of Paris,” the French people were less than impressed by their government’s gallant response. The political right in that country admired Hitler while the left remained unwavering pacifists throughout the war’s early stages. Smith observed that Parisians so willingly “opened the gates of Paris to the German army” that the occupation proved to be “embarrassingly simple.”

Over the next four years, cultural life in the French capital flourished, with classical music, art exhibits and filmmaking thriving to such a degree that philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would later say of that time, “We put up with it very well.” By 1943, more than 80,000 French women who bore children to German soldiers had claimed benefits from the Third Reich; fashion icon Coco Chanel was a shameless collaborator throughout the war; and the leading French film actress of the day brazenly declared, “My heart is French but my [body] is international.”

It was not until Allied forces invaded Sicily and Soviet troops began surging westward that many Parisians began to grow weary of the occupation. While such cynicism in the face of evil seems unthinkable eight decades later, it is worth remembering that France suffered more than 5 million killed and wounded during World War I. Over half of all Frenchmen mobilized for battle became casualties, and almost 4 of 10 soldiers between 19 and 22 were killed in action. The “war to end all wars” laid waste to an entire generation and fueled the cynicism that Ernest Hemingway described a decade later in “A Farewell to Arms.” Continue reading.

Trump’s lawyers are also on trial

The president’s impeachment trial has revealed a common Trump theme: The lawyers he brings in to defend his behavior end up in their own legal morass.

They’ve been accused of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy. They’ve been dubbed ethically compromised. They’ve been labeled liars. They could even be called to testify in the impeachment case they were hired to combat.

In the opening days of Donald Trump’s Senate trial, it has at times felt like the president’s lawyers are his co-defendants.

“Nonsense,” said Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving personal attorney to Trump, when asked about the litany of allegations flying around Capitol Hill. Continue reading.

How Trump’s Senate trial lawyers could complicate the case his DOJ lawyers are making in court

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s legal team took House Democrats to task in the opening hours of the Senate impeachment trial for refusing to defer to the federal courts and rushing to impeach the president without waiting for judges to resolve lingering disputes over witnesses and evidence.

But that doesn’t sound at all like the Trump Justice Department’s team that is actually navigating those courts. In fact, it’s pretty contradictory, some legal experts suggest, and could affect the administration’s efforts in those cases.

“We’re acting as if the courts are an improper venue to determine constitutional issues of this magnitude,” the president’s lawyer Jay Sekulow declared on the Senate floor. “That is why we have the courts, that is why we have a federal judiciary.” Continue reading.

Law professor details 4 glaring ‘deficiencies’ with Trump lawyers’ impeachment trial brief: ‘We’ve seen this before with the tantrums’

AlterNet logoOn Monday, January 20, attorneys representing President Donald Trump during his impeachment trial submitted a legal brief voicing their reasons for objecting to the trial. The 109-page brief has been drawing a great deal of criticism from Trump’s opponents, who argue that the attorneys’ reasoning is badly flawed in multiple ways. And law professor Michael J. Gerhardt, analyzing the brief in an article published by Just Security on January 21, cites four fundamental “deficiencies that make it more of a political screed than a legal document deserving of respect and serious consideration by senators, the public, historians and constitutional scholars.”

Deficiency #1, according to Gerhardt, is the “table pounding” tone of the memo — which the law professor criticizes for being “replete with bluster” and using over-the-top rhetoric like “an affront to the Constitution” and “a political tool to overturn the result of the 2016 presidential election.”

“— I am being precise and literal with that choice of words — thrown by Republican members of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees,” observes Gerhardt, who teaches at the University of North Carolina. “The only thing this kind of rhetoric seemingly achieves is energizing the president’s base.” Continue reading.

How McConnell Plans To Conceal New Witnesses In Trump Trial

During the House’s impeachment inquiry, Republicans raged about the process, condemning Democrats for holding witness interviews behind closed doors and even trying to dismiss the entire investigation because of it.

Donald Trump himself said the process had “zero transparency” because of the closed-door depositions. Republicans went as far as protesting the process by storming a secure area of the Capitol where the closed-door depositions were being held, a move that compromised national security.

However, under the impeachment trial rules crafted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, any potential impeachment witnesses would first need to be deposed behind closed doors — adopting a process the GOP attacked Democrats for using. The “Senate shall decide after deposition which witnesses shall testify, pursuant to the impeachment rules,” according to McConnell’s resolution. Continue reading.

The Memo: Day One shows conflicting narratives on impeachment

The Hill logoThe third impeachment trial of an American president got underway in earnest on Tuesday, amid an atmosphere of instant recrimination and polarization.

One small exception came when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made a last-minute concession, announcing that each side would have three days — not two as he had previously asserted — to make its case.

But that was a rare, and relatively minor, shift from McConnell, who has previously said that he would coordinate the conduct of the trial with the White House. Continue reading.