Senators can vote present, but in reading the rules of the trial a few weeks ago, it is clear that is not an option in this situation. Senators are required to vote guilty or not guilty. Arlen Specter famously sought to vote “not proven” in the Clinton trial, and the Chief Justice said something to the effect of, “We are just going to count that as not guilty.”
If your oncologist says that there’s a 5% chance the results were a false positive, isn’t there some part of you that hopes you’re in the 5%, probability be damned? And when it’s confirmed to definitely be cancer of the AIDSbola, wouldn’t your heart sink, even if logic told you to give up false hope at the start?
And, while not expecting a guilty verdict, I am one of many who hoped that at least a few senators believed more in their country and their constitution than their reelection prospects. Realistically, the number of senators who truly believe, deep in their hearts, that the president did nothing wrong is minuscule. The rest just don’t care or are afraid to buck McConnell, who controls disbursement of campaign funds from one of the biggest Republican superpacs. Piss off Mitch and you can’t even afford to run any kind of reelection campaign.
UV, Dershowitz keeps saying a president involved in a “legal” situation. He frequently uses the word “legal” in the arguments you link to. But Trump’s holding up the funding that had already been approved by Congress is illegal.
He seems to have trouble with that part.
Abuse of power is abuse of trust. There is no higher honor than that trust, to put ourselves at risk to his power. There is no higher crime or misdemeanor than the betrayal of that honor, and that trust. Even if learned lawyers torture the semantics and squeeze out a definition of “not illegal!”, the betrayal remains. Shame.
And irony of all, the only one who would stand up against him was the Ken doll carved from frozen mayonnaise, Mitt F! Romney.
New to me.
Based on the description, it sounds like it’s a pretty high bar for the defense to meet, if they want to make the argument.
Of course, that assumes an impartial jury and that the norms of criminal procedure applied.
Jonathan Turley thinks Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats misplayed the impeachment very badly.
The D’s were under pressure to get it all over with quickly. I agree with Turley: If they weren’t going to take the time to do it right, they shouldn’t have done it at all.
Obligatory SNL cold open:
I’ll also note that:
- They shouldn’t have televised their witnesses in the House.
- They shouldn’t have shotgunned the prosecution as a random grab-bag of House committee chairs. They should have hired a real lawyer and let him do what he does.
- They should have gone for information on Trump’s past from New York and other states, where there would have been no fight against their subpoenas. If they subpoena Kris Hansen, for example, he would be forced to appear.
- They should have messaged what they were doing better. When they turned down requests to hear from Hunter, for example, they let that sit quietly for weeks before offering a rationale - even though that rationale was fairly easy to make and reasonable. They made no particular explanation for why they dropped their court cases. They didn’t tell us, again, why they were rushing the case until well after they’d already had all the hearings and started to head to the Senate.
I don’t think they did. I think, and this is just my opinion I have no real factual basis for it, they knew that the Senate would not vote guilty and were unlikely to vote for witnesses. Let them. Get their votes on the record. Then as Trump’s crimes mount, as more information is revealed, their vote for failing to remove a criminal from the office of the president becomes their albatross.
Now, you might say, but then they can claim had they waited for all the information they might have voted differently. Great! Let them make that claim, let them clamour for the opportunity to remove the president. But they won’t because they cannot. They know that to do so, to turn on Trump, is political suicide.
So, I think they played it fairly well. If the Republicans were to suddenly start to act with honor, and so in the nation’s interest, great. If the Republicans acted in self-interest, then this gets them on the record.
This isn’t to say that what they did was perfect. There are things I would change, but all in all, I do not think they really blew it.
One way or another, the impeachment was always going to be tried in the court of public opinion. The only way to hammer this home to people was to keep it simple. For a random member of the public, if what they remember from all of this as a court battle over whether so and so can be compelled to testify, they lose interest. Sure, waiting months for all the house subpoenas to come in wasn’t long enough to impact the election, but it means that the headlines, which have pretty consistently about the actual scandal up until this final senate fight, would turn into what some judge was likely to rule about some subpoena.
I know, right? The “attacks” are relatively easy because Dershowitz’s constitutional opinion that a crime is necessary to impeach is so catastrophically wrong.
Which, were you not so deeply ingrained in partisanship, would indicate to you that maybe, since almost every expert in the field disagrees with him, he’s catastrophically wrong.
And I posted numerous responses to Curtis that showed that Dershowitz’s adoption of his argument was catastrophically wrong.
You are wrong too. It’s clear, to me, to most other posters in this thread, to almost every con-law expert, to everyone but Dershowitz and his lackeys, that that is a misinterpretation of the term.
This paragraph actually makes me sad. I like to think that, in most things, rationality and evidence are guiding lights. I like to think that lawyers, especially, have the ability to discern good arguments from bad arguments and the ability to cite to actual evidence for that position. When I see a lawyer so clearly putting his abilities as a lawyer aside to make an untenable argument based solely on partisanship, it makes me sad. Doing it to protect the rights of the accused (like criminal defense attorneys) or to make money (like many attorneys) or to get name recognition, or a combination of all three (like Dershowitz), sure. But to work so hard to make a bad argument on a message board simply for partisanship sake, makes me sad.
I know I pointed all this out (and still unrefuted by you) earlier, but here goes again. “Misdemeanors”, as used by the founders in the Impeachment Clause, does not mean “little crimes”. You’re using a 2020 definition for a 1783 word. First, it would be very poor writing to say “for Big crimes and little crimes”, it’s redundant and unnecessary. If you could impeach for little crimes, of course you can impeach for big crimes.
But there’s more. You have, of course, Hamilton’s writing. You have John Adams saying: "“If an office be granted to hold so long as he behaves himself well in the office, that is an estate for life, unless he lose it for misbehaviour; for it hath an annexed condition to be forfeited upon misdemeanor, and this by law is annexed to all offices, they being trusts; and misdemeanors in an office is a breach of trust.” You have a 1796 South Carolina opinion saying: "“is liable for misdemeanors in office, and subject to impeachment for misconduct if he misbehaved.” You have other state constitutions using the term misdemeanors and they did not require criminal offenses. You have actual senators and judges from that era who committed no crimes, but were impeached and removed. You have James Madison saying that misdemeanors was too broad and would include non-criminal conduct and then it gets passed. You have the great Justice Story saying, very specifically, that no crime had to have occurred to impeach.
There is a mountain of evidence that you and Dershowitz simply ignore. And that’s a shame. But at least Dersh is getting paid and getting name recognition.
Baloney. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is that standard that the founders adopted. You can’t impeach for just doing a bad job, or being disliked, but you can for actual abuse of power. Or being drunk on the bench. Or taking the name of the Lord in vain. Or trying to give land to Britan. Or for extorting a foreign govenment to announce an investigation into a political rival.
- Given that they did televise their witnesses in the House, they should have focused the Senate trial on Contempt of Congress, throwing in Ukraine as an aside.
I’m assuming the lawyer you mention in the first sentence is UltraVires. But as to Dersh, the thing that annoys me the most about him is his repeated assertion that he is only involved in the trial because, dammit, he just wants to get to the bottom of what the Constitution says about impeachable offenses, and has no other reason. But if that were the case, he could write a book or article where he presents various arguments for what an impeachable offense is, weighs the evidence for each, and then tells us why he agrees with Curtis and whomever else he cited. But no, he picks the one argument that suits his needs: the one that ensures the Trump admin would hire him to make a case for on the Senate floor, in the biggest political/legal story of the century. He gets to once again stand in the spotlight and display his awesome* legal mind. To be clear, if he would just say he joined the team because for whatever reason he doesn’t think Trump should be impeached and he is simply doing what a good defense lawyer does, fine.
*By many accounts, he does in fact have an awesome legal mind. I have no idea myself, but to pick an argument that to me says a president could have someone literally murdered if it’s in the best interest of the country, is a very strange thing to do.
Dershowitz did what he was hired to do: Give the Republicans a rationale, no matter how untenable, to tank the impeachment. The rationale he chose (the “it must be a crime” bullshit), has no support in the plain language, in the original understanding of impeachment, or the 200+ years of practice of impeachment. It didn’t have to, though, because the goal wasn’t to convince a judge or to hear evidence; the goal was simply to cover up for the President’s actions as quickly and quietly as possible. And, in that sense, Dersh was very successful.
Okay, and as for me, I still believe there must be some Republican senators who think Trump did something wrong, but it just doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
Lamar Alexander: “I agree he did something inappropriate, but I don’t agree he did anything akin to treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors. I think there’s a big gap there,” Alexander told NPR.
This doesn’t mean I agree with him, but I respect his opinion.
Surely. He knew he had to do something of this sort, or of course he wouldn’t get to be involved in it.
This would have been the worst idea. I absolutely think that obstructing investigations into his conduct should be taken seriously, but we already know that most Americans don’t care. Back before the Mueller investigation, he admitted on national TV to obstructing the FBI investigation into his crimes related to the 2016 election. There’s no reason to emphasize something that the people who ultimately decide the verdict don’t care about.
What is there to respect in it?
Put your right foot in, take your left foot out, change people’s minds, that’s what it’s all about. And that is possible, it does happen. Never has much as we want, never as soon, but it does.
Otherwise, Plan B is give up and go dig a hole. Dunno about you, but I’m just too damn stubborn.