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The Shame Of The Senate

The Shame Of The Senate

Well before completing his first term, President Donald Trump firmly established himself as the worst president in American history, which should surprise nobody. What we have seen this week suggests that many of the senators now hearing his impeachment trial will join him in historic infamy.

From the very beginning of Trump’s impeachment, a majority of Republican senators have indicated that they would not dare to sanction his unmistakable wrongdoing.

The Republicans stood mutely as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the nation that he would manage the trial in lockstep with the president’s lawyers. They said nothing when the president brushed aside the constitutional separation of powers and the prerogatives of Congress by withholding all evidence and witnesses. They pretended to believe McConnell when he promised to conduct the trial fairly, and apply the same standards and procedures seen during the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.

And then, knowing that McConnell planned to railroad Trump’s acquittal, they falsely swore an oath to do “impartial justice.”

During the first two days of the trial, as the House Democrats set forth the facts and the law, Republican senators did little to redeem themselves and much to betray that oath. Some of them violated Senate rules in departing early from the long sessions mandated by their own leadership. Some rudely made a show of ignoring the case presented by the House managers — including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who brazenly perused a book on the Senate floor, Rand Paul (R-KY), who doodled on a pad, and Richard Burr (R-NC), who amused himself with a fidget spinner. Those juvenile acts likewise made a mockery of their responsibilities.

Others acted out in ways that revealed the truth their party now aims to conceal. So Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a member of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, leaped up from his seat red-faced when one of the impeachment managers displayed a bipartisan letter he had signed in 2016 demanding the removal of Ukraine chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. That letter decisively disproves Trump’s central accusation against former Vice President Joe Biden — and badly embarrassed Johnson, who later said that he didn’t remember signing it and had been misled.

He looked like a fool, but that isn’t news either.

Perhaps the most egregious conduct in the Senate so far, aside from McConnell’s scheming to fix the trial, can be laid to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). His longtime association with the late John McCain encouraged mistaken assumptions about his character that he is now disproving every day. While he connives with McConnell to conceal the evidence of Trump’s impeachable conduct, he must endure the continuous playback of video clips that prove his monumental hypocrisy, cynicism and bad faith.

Back when he was an eager young House manager, hoping to make a name for himself by prosecuting Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes, Graham delivered impassioned pleas to the Senate, demanding attention and fairness.

“Do justice to the case,” he implored the senators who might have decided to acquit Clinton in advance. “Don’t decide the case before the case’s end.” While he now excuses and even defends Trump’s stonewalling, Graham said in 1998 that a president who defies congressional subpoenas is subject to removal from office.

“The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day that he was subject to impeachment,” Graham intoned, “because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury.” Such an arrogant presumption describes precisely what Trump has done more brazenly than Nixon ever dared, yet Graham and his Senate colleagues don’t even whisper an objection.

Four years ago, Graham predicted that if Republicans were to nominate Donald Trump for president, their party “would be destroyed” and “would deserve it.” His defense of Trump, even knowing the crimes perpetrated by him, is destroying forever the reputation of Graham and every other Republican senator implicated in the cover-up. They could restore a semblance of probity by reversing course on subpoenas of witnesses and documents, but that seems unlikely.

Instead they are engraving the shame of the Senate, once the world’s greatest deliberative body, on their own souls.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

A Fair And Balanced Impeachment Trial

A Fair And Balanced Impeachment Trial

When Mitch McConnell declares that the impeachment of President Donald Trump should follow the same rules and procedures as the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, that must sound reasonable to many Americans. As the Senate majority leader puts it in his folksiest drawl, “Fair is fair.”

Leave aside the fact that McConnell — who swore an oath on Thursday before Chief Justice John Roberts to do “impartial justice” in that trial — has already told us that he isn’t an impartial juror. Let’s also try to forget for the moment that he regularly bends his own supposed principles and practices for partisan advantage.

If he were to really believe that Trump ought to be tried according to the same standards as Clinton, what would he and the Senate Republicans do?

First they would require this president to undergo several hours of questioning under oath, as Clinton did before the grand jury convened by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Surely, McConnell — and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and a dozen of their colleagues — will recollect that Clinton spent four hours answering the questions of prosecutors and grand jurors regarding the Monica Lewinsky affair. (He had given six earlier interviews to prosecutors in other investigations.) Recorded on video, which the Republicans later released to the public, Clinton’s testimony was excerpted and played during the impeachment trial by the House managers.

Second, McConnell would demand that the president surrender all relevant documents on the Ukraine matter to Congress, along with the implicated aides and associates whom he has so far forbidden from testifying — including Vice President Mike Pence; acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; former national security adviser John Bolton; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and sundry officials from the Office of Management and Budget, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department.

Only then would the current process begin to reflect the Clinton precedent cited by McConnell. That’s because in contrast to Trump, Clinton never tried to prevent his aides from testifying in any of the investigations mounted against him and answered every document request. Owing to Clinton’s cooperation, the Office of Independent Counsel compiled and delivered a multi-volume report on the Lewinsky affair to the House Judiciary Committee, which was used by House managers to guide their prosecution of Clinton in the Senate.

Back then, as one of the House managers, Graham argued strenuously for the Senate to call three witnesses including Lewinksy, who testified on videotape behind closed doors. Like Clinton’s grand jury testimony, those videotapes were available for use in the trial, and the House managers played dozens of excerpts of Lewinsky’s testimony on the Senate floor.

Now McConnell, Graham and other Trump toadies in the Senate notoriously object to calling any witnesses in the upcoming trial. Their clear preference would be to dismiss the impeachment articles without any trial. But the Republicans know they can’t get away with any such blatant cover-up, especially with new evidence continuing to erupt into almost every day’s news cycle. (Events of the past few weeks have proved again the sagacity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who outplays her adversaries at every turn.)

So those are the parameters of a fair impeachment trial, if “fair” means anything remotely similar to the trial of William Jefferson Clinton. The conditions precedent to fairness don’t exist at present, but there is nothing stopping the Senate from ensuring a balanced and honest process, except the dishonesty and partisan bias of its leadership.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: Right now, the Republican leadership is reportedly mulling heavy restrictions on media coverage of the Senate trial, provoking protests from reporters. They also have yet to consent to televised coverage via C-Span’s cameras. During Clinton’s trial, there were no impediments on the press — and the trial itself can be seen in C-Span archives to this day.

That same standard of openness must prevail now, unless McConnell wants to be exposed as a fraud from the first whack of the gavel.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo Credit: Matt Johnson
Politics In The Spirit

Politics In The Spirit

The spirit of goodwill can take us by surprise in this season, without respect to religion (or even politics). And while such a moment may not quite become an epiphany, it can still make us think again about our lives and times. Which is what happened to me over the weekend before Christmas.

Visiting the nation’s capital, as we do every year at this time, I was invited by friends to attend a holiday party hosted by an eminent conservative writer – someone whom I knew only as a political opponent of long standing. Our last encounter, on a radio show before the 2016 election, had not concluded on friendly terms, at least in my recollection. I held a caricature of him in my mind and assumed he would feel similarly toward me – although during the intervening years he had turned against the Trump-dominated Republican Party and its reprehensible leader.

The writer assured my friends that I’d be welcome at his party, so I went along, still thinking this might become a highly uncomfortable situation because of past conflicts.

When I arrived, however, he and his wife both greeted me warmly. He graciously took the time to introduce me to other guests, and as we talked, his sincere friendliness was undeniable and uplifting. 

I began to realize, as I should have much sooner, that his political journey had cost him something important. Like so many of the Republicans (and former Republicans) who have turned away from Trump, he had forfeited many friends and relationships in a wrenching experience that had changed his life. He had been forced to confront deeply troubling aspects of his own political affiliations and of people to whom he had once been close. Reading the messages we exchanged in the days that followed, I felt a twinge of unexpected empathy for this man.

For liberals, the Never-Trump conservatives have presented a series of these conundrums. Each of them is an individual, with her or his own ideology, career, and future aspirations. Some of them have faced quite squarely the moral compromises that eventually led to Trump and Trumpism, including a history of Republican racial pandering that dates back to the Nixon era; others have not. 

And so far, very few of these conservative Trump critics have asked themselves what responsibility they may bear for the decades of exaggerated animus against Hillary Clinton, whose demonization by the right and its media opened the way for Trump. While many of the Never-Trumpers probably voted for her, and almost all of them have confessed we’d be far better off if she were president today, their own culpability in framing her as “Crooked Hillary,” in Trump’s infamous phrasing, remains a largely unacknowledged responsibility. (The same is still true of the mainstream media, which so eagerly cooperated in distorting her image.) 

Reckoning with those old quarrels will have to wait. For now, we look forward to a new year when we will have a chance to free our democracy from the curse of Trump. Every hand will be needed. My own strong impulse is to welcome new allies, assume their good motivations, and treat them generously, without regard to the past. That is not only the spirit of Christmas but the spirit of America, a nation that has freed generations of people to reinvent themselves and build a new society.

 Someday when Trump is gone, we may yet find ourselves debating intensely again with those who are now at our side opposing him. When that day comes, it will be good if we can remember that our adversaries need not be our enemies, and that we should practice politics with decency and kindness. We will need to include everyone willing to share in that spirit, no matter their errors.

Will Republicans Risk A Rigged Trial?

Will Republicans Risk A Rigged Trial?

When President Donald Trump’s defenders aren’t simply lying about the House impeachment inquiry — it all happened in a Capitol Hill basement with no Republicans present, as one of his lawyers told National Public Radio — they complain about the lack of firsthand witnesses to presidential abuse. They assume nobody will notice that Trump himself forbid any testimony by those with the most direct knowledge of his attempts to extort Ukraine.

For some reason, his defenders don’t regard his silencing of potential witnesses as an admission of presidential guilt. Instead, they eagerly join him in presenting the nation with an insoluble dilemma: Impeachment can’t be considered serious or fair without direct fact witnesses — and there can be no direct fact witnesses because the president has every right to squelch them.

In this way, the Republicans have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to oversee a president run amok. Their craven posture assures Trump that he can do whatever he wants, just as he has declared, while they exempt him from the rule of law.

Imitating the coarse example of their political boss, Republicans are increasingly brazen in expressing contempt for the Constitution. That document mandates a Senate trial following impeachment by the House, which doesn’t mean a sham tribunal or an instant dismissal. Moreover, according to Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution and the Senate rules, every senator is mandated to “swear or affirm” an oath to do “impartial justice” in any impeachment proceeding.

Yet both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have publicly announced their rejection of an impartial Senate trial.

On Fox News, McConnell said that he is plotting how to handle the trial with White House lawyers — before he even begins to discuss the matter with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Everything I do during this I’m coordinating with White House counsel,” he brayed. “There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can.”

As for Graham, he told an audience in Doha, Qatar, that his aim is to ensure the impeachment “dies quickly,” without any annoying examination of facts or witnesses. “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind,” said the same man who once demanded, when he managed then-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999, that every senator keep an open mind. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here,” he added in further self-indictment.

Presumably, Graham and McConnell intend to swear the required oath with a premeditated intent to violate it. Evidently, they’re eager to bring fresh dishonor on themselves and their institution.

It is still possible that Chief Justice John Roberts, who will preside over the impeachment trial as prescribed by the Constitution, will assert the Constitution’s primacy over the partisan chicanery of the Senate Republican leaders? Roberts could insist that the Senate hold a real trial, with actual witnesses (including Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton and others who have direct knowledge of Trump’s misconduct). And if he hopes to maintain his reputation as anything other than a right-wing stooge — and stand up against the constitutional vandalism of his fellow Republicans — that is what he must do. We may soon see what he is made of and whether he is up to this historic moment.

Rules and clauses aside, the great majority of Americans of all political persuasions understand fairness when they see it — and most of them still have enough sense to detect a political fix, too. Polls show that even Republicans agree overwhelmingly that impeachment requires an actual trial, with evidence and witnesses. If McConnell, Graham and the Republican Senate foist a rigged proceeding on the public, they will risk a furious rebuke next November.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.