Full agreed. I’d also add the tweets telling Proud Boys to stand by and his other inflammatory tweets surrounding the insurrection.
It’s not worth opening a new thread for so apologies for de-zombie-ing this one but, to share, here’s a review of how Congress and Pelosi bungled the impeachments:
I would also, personally, add that the House almost certainly has the power of limiting the President’s right to issue pardons, acting as the equivalent to a grand jury:
All investigations of Trump and his activities were deeply hindered by his ability to issue pardons. It’s the blank check he had available to write, to keep people on his side.
Blocking that was free and painless, once the Democrats had the majority in Congress. And yet, they never did so. There was no demerit to it like the prospect of spending two years on a deeply contentious impeachment, just to still potentially lose in the Senate. You just write some words on a piece of paper, hold a partisan vote, and Bob’s your uncle.
I don’t personally see any reason to have avoided doing it other than because Trump was too useful to Democrats as a fundraiser. In all ways, where we’re talking the health and strength of our democratic systems, it was a no-brainer to block him from pardoning his implicated pals.
Wouldn’t it have to get past the filibuster?
In the House?
Fair enough, but I don’t see anything in the constitution or in case law that backs this. Sure, James Madison said this, but he didn’t put it in the Constitution, or explain how it should work.
Let’s say the House suspended Trump’s pardon ability, and Trump challenges that. How do you think SCOTUS will rule on it?
Because the Republicans vote as a block, a third trial would most likely suffer the same fate as the first two. Let the criminal and civil courts handle him now.
The context of his statement is that, before everyone would vote whether to ratify the Constitution or not, Madison and George Mason had a debate over every line item in the document, in front of the whole Constitutional Congress.
When they all proceeded to the vote, they were voting in some not-insubstantial part on the basis of what was said. That debate formalizes the understanding of the Constitution before the Framers. You can effectively view it as the official footnotes on what every line does and explicitly does not mean - giving us the final version of the background conversations that everyone has having, and what the ultimate shared understanding of what it all meant was.
Mason made no objection to the statement, offered no counterpoint, etc. He simply moved on, without debate - and we have to assume that it’s because he accepted that it was true.
I would expect them to accept it.
The House serves the part of the Grand Jury, on the basis of its history. A grand jury has powers of subpoena, powers to restrict the movement of the person under investigation, etc. These are powers that are necessary to allow it to perform its duty, to bring an indictment.
The House has similar powers that are necessary to allow it to perform its duty, to bring an impeachment. The Framers have explicitly talked about it and performed a vote after having that exact thing explained to them and there’s nothing unreasonable - in a land based on the idea of the rule of law - that the pardon power should be moved to a secondary individual, for cases that would impact the ability of the House to affect an impeachment.
To answer the OP, that is determined by the sitting Senate. Almost always they have decided that they do not have jurisdiction if a person has left office. However in the impeachment of Secretary Belknap the Senate decided that they did have jurisdiction after he resigned because they could bar him from ever holding office again. They did not stick to this rule however in later trials.
So, your contention is that they could have done this with no problem, no question of SCOTUS overruling or interpreting, based on the words of Madison?
And the only reason they didn’t do this is they wanted to allow Trump to be able to pardon so that he’d be useful as a fundraiser?
I can’t guarantee it but, generally, yes.
I have no alternate theories. I’d prefer one that seemed less scheming and diabolic and, if you propose one, I will almost certainly switch to it.
At the best, all I can offer is that it was less conscious and more, “Well, we’ll probably lose the big ticket item in the Senate so why bother even if we’d win on that one thing?” But that’s still a fairly conscious decision to let Paul Manafort go free, and I don’t see any justification for that when Congress is far from opposed to voting on stuff that’s small and meaningless - especially when it would allow the Democrats to screw over Trump a little bit.
A popular saying is, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” So, I would still lean towards that foundation as the underlying criteria for why the laziness mentality was able to win against screwing Trump over.
Again, unless you’re able to propose an alternative.
The House went into both impeachments knowing for a certainty that the Senate would never convict. Nor was there ever even one second during which “fact-finding … might have persuaded the public to turn away from the president” as in that link.
Only a constitutional amendment can take away the President’s pardon power and only a constitutional amendment can make it possible to impeach someone who’s not in office. No amount of Internet second-guessing is going to change that in the real world.
Do you have any other examples of a time where Congress exercised some power not given to them by the Constitution, and SCOTUS said it was okay based on the argument of “Well Madison said we should have that power”?
My car is definitely under warranty. When I bought it I asked the dealer because there was no warranty in the paperwork I signed, but he assured me that it if it broke down, the manufacturer would definitely take care of it.
This has all the makings of a great John Grisham/Scott Turow novel. “The vote is pending. But few of the Senators are present and have not been heard from in a week. Their families are frantic, and the clock is ticking on the vote…”
There is a textual problem. In relevant part “the President” may be impeached by the House and then tried and convicted by the Senate. Donald Trump (or GWB or Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover) is not “the President” and therefore they are not amenable to impeachment and/or trial. It seems as if jurisdiction, for lack of a better word, is lost once the subject of the impeachment trial is no longer “the President.”
Further if “the President” is the reason for action, the CJ Roberts has to preside. If he is not presiding who is being impeached and/or tried and under what power?
This is nonsense.
Your cite for this is a guy who stopped practicing law to write mystery novels 25 years ago.
There are no real world cheat codes.