Senate decides to proceed with trial, but Trump
appears to have votes for acquittal.
The Senate voted on Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment
trial of former President Donald J. Trump, rejecting his defense team’s claim
that it would be unconstitutional to prosecute a president after leaving
office. But the final tally signaled that his Republican allies could muster
enough support to potentially block the two-thirds necessary for conviction.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/09/us/trump-impeachment-trial
The
56-to-44 vote, with six Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, paved the way for
the House Democrats trying the case to formally open their arguments on
Wednesday afternoon as they seek to prove that Mr. Trump incited an
insurrection by encouraging supporters who stormed the Capitol last month and
disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes.
But the 44
Republicans who agreed with Mr. Trump’s claim that a former president cannot be
subject to an impeachment trial seemed to all but guarantee that he would have
the 34 votes he needs on the final verdict to avoid conviction. To succeed, the
House managers would need to persuade at least 11 Republican senators to find
Mr. Trump guilty in a trial that they have deemed unconstitutional.
New York
Times reporters covered the first day of former President Donald J. Trump’s
second Senate impeachment trial. The trial began Tuesday with a debate about
the constitutionality of putting a former president on trial.
The vote
came after House managers, arguing to proceed with the trial, presented the
Senate with a vivid and graphic sequence of footage of Mr. Trump’s backers
assaulting the Capitol last month.
The
managers wasted no time moving immediately to their most powerful evidence: the
explicit visual record of the deadly Capitol siege that threatened the lives of
former Vice President Mike Pence and members of both houses of Congress
juxtaposed against Mr. Trump’s own words encouraging members of the mob at a
rally beforehand.
The scenes
of mayhem and violence — punctuated by expletives rarely heard on the floor of
the Senate — highlighted the drama of the trial in gut-punching fashion for the
senators who lived through the events barely a month ago and now sit as
quasi-jurors. On the screens, they saw enraged extremists storming barricades,
beating police officers, setting up a gallows and yelling, “Take the building,”
“Fight for Trump” and “Pence is a traitor! Traitor Pence!”
“You ask
what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution,” Representative
Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the leader of the House Democrats prosecuting the
case, told the senators after playing the video. “That’s a high crime and
misdemeanor. If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there’s no such thing.”
Mr. Trump’s
lawyers responded by arguing that his words at the rally on Jan. 6 constituted
free speech akin to typical political language and hardly incited the violence.
They characterized the impeachment as yet another partisan attack driven by
animus that will set a precedent for political retribution as power changes
with each election.
“The
political pendulum will shift one day,” Bruce L. Castor Jr., the lawyer leading
off for the former president, told the Senate. “This chamber and the chamber
across the way will change one day and partisan impeachments will become
commonplace.”
The second
trial of Mr. Trump opened in the crime scene itself, the same chamber occupied
on Jan. 6 by the mob that forced senators to evacuate in the middle of counting
the Electoral College votes ratifying President Biden’s victory.
Never
before has a president been tried by the Senate twice, much less after his term
has expired, but Mr. Trump’s accusers argue that his actions in his final days
in power were so egregious and threatening to democracy that he must be held
accountable.
“What you
experienced that day, what we experienced that day, what our country
experienced that day, is the framers’ worst nightmare come to life,”
Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado and another impeachment
manager, told the senators. “Presidents can’t inflame insurrection in their
final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened.”
Even though
Mr. Trump can no longer be removed from office, conviction would stand as a
statement of repudiation for history and permit the senators to bar him from
running for federal office again.
The
managers maintained that there must be no “January exception” for presidents to
escape repercussions through impeachment on their way out of office and cited a
series of writings by the nation’s framers as well as contemporary conservative
scholars.
Mr. Trump’s
lawyers condemned the violence but rejected the suggestion that the former
president was responsible for it. They maintained that the Constitution did not
permit an impeachment trial of a former president because it was meant to lead
to removal, and Mr. Trump is no longer in office. If he committed a crime, they
said, he could be prosecuted criminally.
“This idea
of a January amnesty is nonsense,” Mr. Castor said. “There is no opportunity
where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end
of his term and just go away scot free. The Department of Justice does know
what to do with such people.”
— Peter Baker
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