Saturday, February 13, 2021

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7 Republican Senators Explain Why They Voted To Convict Trump




By Sara Boboltz and Dominique Mosbergen 

 “He is guilty,” Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said.

Seven Republican senators made ex-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial the most bipartisan in American history, even if their votes did not tip the scales enough to convict him. The final vote was 57 to 43, 10 votes short of the threshold needed to secure a conviction, with seven Republicans joining the Democrats.

Most Republicans followed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s example, claiming the Senate did not have the constitutional authority to put a former president on trial ― though constitutional scholars have largely disagreed with that argument.

In any case, McConnell could have used his powers as majority leader to begin the trial while Trump was still in the White House. He chose not to. 

Regardless, Democratic House impeachment managers made their best efforts to lay out historical precedent for trying a former official alongside all the ways Trump incited the Capitol insurrection by refusing to accept his electoral defeat. As a direct result of the violence, five people died, including a Capitol police officer, and more than 100 people were injured. World leaders expressed horror at the “attack on democracy.”  

The Republicans who voted to convict Trump were Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.). 

Here is why they voted the way they did.

Bill Cassidy

The Louisiana senator offered a simple explanation in a video posted to Twitter. 

“The Constitution in our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” he said.

Cassidy had sharply criticized Trump’s defense team after their first day on the Senate floor, calling them “disorganized.”

“One side’s doing a great job,” he said Tuesday, referring to House Democrats, “And the other side’s doing a terrible job on the issue at hand.”

He did not hint about which way he was leaning before the vote, however. 

Richard Burr

The senator from North Carolina had voted to dismiss Trump’s impeachment trial before it began. 

“When this process started, I believed that it was unconstitutional to impeach a president who was no longer in office. I still believe that to be the case,” he said in a statement. “However, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority in the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent.”

Burr wrote that he believed his role to be that of “an impartial juror” and found during the presentations that “the facts are clear” ― Trump’s actions rose to “the level of high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

“The President promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results,” he said. “As Congress met to certify the election results, the President directed his supporters to go to the Capitol and disrupt the lawful proceedings required by the Constitution. When the crowd became violent, the President used his office to first inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault.” 

“By what he did and did not do, President Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Susan Collins

The senator from Maine cited many of the arguments House impeachment managers presented during the trial in her reasoning for voting to convict.

“That attack was not a spontaneous outbreak of violence. Rather, it was a culmination of a steady stream of provocations by President Trump that were aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election,” Collins said on the Senate floor Saturday. “The president’s unprecedented efforts to discredit the election results did not begin on Jan. 6. Rather, he planted the seeds of doubt many weeks before votes were cast on Nov. 3.”

She continued: “President Trump’s falsehoods convinced a large number of Americans that he had won, and that they were being cheated.” 

Collins also cited in her remarks Trump’s “incredible effort to pressure state election officials to change the results in their states,” specifically noting his call with Georgia’s secretary of state in early January. Trump, Collins said, oscillated “between lobbying, cajoling, intimidating and threatening” the officials.

Collins said that Trump ultimately created a dangerous situation, “whether by design or by virtue of a reckless disregard for the consequences of his action.”

Seven Republican senators made ex-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial the most bipartisan in American history, even if their votes did not tip the scales enough to convict him. The final vote was 57 to 43, 10 votes short of the threshold needed to secure a conviction, with seven Republicans joining the Democrats.

Most Republicans followed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s example, claiming the Senate did not have the constitutional authority to put a former president on trial ― though constitutional scholars have largely disagreed with that argument.

In any case, McConnell could have used his powers as majority leader to begin the trial while Trump was still in the White House. He chose not to. 

Regardless, Democratic House impeachment managers made their best efforts to lay out historical precedent for trying a former official alongside all the ways Trump incited the Capitol insurrection by refusing to accept his electoral defeat. As a direct result of the violence, five people died, including a Capitol police officer, and more than 100 people were injured. World leaders expressed horror at the “attack on democracy.”  

The Republicans who voted to convict Trump were Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.). 

Here is why they voted the way they did.

Bill Cassidy

The Louisiana senator offered a simple explanation in a video posted to Twitter. 

“The Constitution in our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” he said.

Cassidy had sharply criticized Trump’s defense team after their first day on the Senate floor, calling them “disorganized.”

“One side’s doing a great job,” he said Tuesday, referring to House Democrats, “And the other side’s doing a terrible job on the issue at hand.”

He did not hint about which way he was leaning before the vote, however. 

Richard Burr

The senator from North Carolina had voted to dismiss Trump’s impeachment trial before it began. 

“When this process started, I believed that it was unconstitutional to impeach a president who was no longer in office. I still believe that to be the case,” he said in a statement. “However, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority in the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent.”

Burr wrote that he believed his role to be that of “an impartial juror” and found during the presentations that “the facts are clear” ― Trump’s actions rose to “the level of high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

“The President promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results,” he said. “As Congress met to certify the election results, the President directed his supporters to go to the Capitol and disrupt the lawful proceedings required by the Constitution. When the crowd became violent, the President used his office to first inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault.” 

“By what he did and did not do, President Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Susan Collins

The senator from Maine cited many of the arguments House impeachment managers presented during the trial in her reasoning for voting to convict.

“That attack was not a spontaneous outbreak of violence. Rather, it was a culmination of a steady stream of provocations by President Trump that were aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election,” Collins said on the Senate floor Saturday. “The president’s unprecedented efforts to discredit the election results did not begin on Jan. 6. Rather, he planted the seeds of doubt many weeks before votes were cast on Nov. 3.”

She continued: “President Trump’s falsehoods convinced a large number of Americans that he had won, and that they were being cheated.” 

Collins also cited in her remarks Trump’s “incredible effort to pressure state election officials to change the results in their states,” specifically noting his call with Georgia’s secretary of state in early January. Trump, Collins said, oscillated “between lobbying, cajoling, intimidating and threatening” the officials.

Collins said that Trump ultimately created a dangerous situation, “whether by design or by virtue of a reckless disregard for the consequences of his action.”

Lisa Murkowski 

The senator from Alaska is the only lawmaker among the seven who will have to face voters next year. But she told Politico on Saturday that she wasn’t thinking about her “political ambitions” when she cast her vote.

“If I can’t say what I believe that our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?” Murkowski said. “This was consequential on many levels, but I cannot allow the significance of my vote to be devalued by whether or not I feel that this is helpful for my political ambitions.”

Murkowski said “extraordinary men and women” had stood up for democracy on the day of the riot ― something that Trump did not do. It was for these Americans that lawmakers returned to their chambers in the Capitol after the insurrection to certify the presidential election results, she said.

Mitt Romney

The senator from Utah ― who was seen running from rampaging rioters in footage of the attack that was unreleased until the impeachment trial ― said in a statement that he voted to convict because he believed Trump to be “guilty of the charge made by the House of Representatives.” 

“President Trump attempted to corrupt the election by pressuring the Secretary of State of Georgia to falsify the election results in his state,” Romney said, adding that Trump also “incited the insurrection” and “violated his oath of office by failing to protect the Capitol” and those inside. 

Ben Sasse

“Tribalism is a hell of a drug, but our oath to the Constitution means we’re constrained to the facts,” the senator from Nebraska said in a statement. 

Sasse explained that three main points of argument won him over ― the first two being Trump’s lies about having won the election and the sheer violence of the Capitol attack.

“Third, Congress is a weaker institution than the Founders intended, and it is likely to shrivel still smaller. A lot of Republicans talk about restoring Congress’ power from an already over-aggressive executive branch. Conservatives regularly denounce executive overreach ― but we ought primarily to denounce legislative impotence,” Sasse said. “This trial is constitutional because the president abused his power while in office and the House of Representatives impeached him while he was still in office.”

Pat Toomey

The Pennsylvania senator said he voted to convict Trump because the former president betrayed the Constitution and his oath of office. 

“I was one of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump, in part because of the many accomplishments of his administration,” Toomey said in a statement. “Unfortunately, his behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him.”

Trump urged his supporters “to march on the Capitol for the explicit purpose of preventing” the formal certification of the electoral results ― despite the fact that he’d “legitimately lost” the election, Toomey said. 

“As a result of President Trump’s actions, for the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful,” he added.

Trump’s acquittal seals his grasp on the Republican party

By David Smith
The former president and his supporters are likely to claim victory as they did after his first impeachment trial a year ago.
Donald Trump’s highly anticipated acquittal at his US Senate impeachment trial is the least surprising twist in American politics since … well, his acquittal at his first US Senate impeachment trial a year ago.
On that occasion, with Republicans virtually unanimous in his defence, the then president lorded it over Democrats by staging a celebration in the east room of the White House and gloating over a newspaper front page that proclaimed: “Trump acquitted”.
But this time Trump, already stripped of the trappings of power, suffered a somewhat bipartisan defeat in the Senate has been spared the prospect of becoming the first American president in history to be convicted only because a two-thirds majority is required rather than a simple majority.
The final vote tally was 57-43. Seven Republicans turned on Trump: Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
However, Trump and his supporters are likely to claim victory again. The cloud of January gloom that descended on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in sunny Florida after seemingly endless defeats at the ballot box and in courts will have lifted a little.
The historic debate that played out in the Senate last week is also the final proof positive of a claim made by his son, Donald Trump Jr, at the fateful rally before the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January: “This is Donald Trump’s Republican party!”
If the chilling images of havoc that day – with police under attack and Vice-president Mike Pence, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mitt Romney narrowly escaping with their lives – were not sufficient to wrench the party from Trump’s grasp, then surely nothing is. Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide who switched allegiance to the Democrats, commented: “It’s a demonstration that his status as the leader of the Republican party is unchanged, even though the results of the election have shown that his agenda is a losing agenda for the Republican party.”
One explanation is that senators’ actions are ultimately shaped by Republican state parties, which are ever more radically pro-Trump, and by grassroots supporters, who were not necessarily paying much attention to the trial.
On Tuesday afternoon an average of 11 million viewers watched the opening arguments across five networks, according to CNN, rising to 12.4 million on Wednesday – a sliver of the US population. Notably, the pro-Trump Fox News’s ratings plummeted during the trial until it cut away to other subjects. In short, the evidence that was devastating to Trump’s reputation, and could harm his future political chances, was not necessarily seen by much of his “Make America great again” base.
That is worth bearing in mind when considering whether or not Trump might take advantage of the fact that his ultimate acquittal will clear the way for him to run for president again in 2024.
Some commentators believe the trial hammered a final nail in that possibility. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “No matter what the verdict of the senators, Trump is going to come out of this disgraced and his political career is over. He’s not going to be able to recover from this trial.” The Hill website reported that some Senate Republicans, including those intending to vote for acquittal, say the trial has “effectively ended any chance of him becoming the GOP presidential nominee in 2024”. It explained: “The emotional case presented by the House impeachment managers stung – and will likely lessen his influence in the Republican party.”
Moreover, Trump faces business troubles, myriad court cases and time’s arrow: he would be 78 by election day and might find the lure of the golf course irresistible. He could instead play the role of kingmaker, inviting a series of Republican hopefuls to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring.
On the other hand, the former president has made comments in the past suggesting that he might consider another run and the Hollywood drama of “the greatest comeback ever” would surely appeal. An Axios-Ipsos poll last month found that 57% of Republicans said Trump should be the party’s nominee in 2024.
Bardella noted: “There are obviously a lot of legal landmines still out there that he’s going to have to overcome. You can never underestimate the ambition of other people in his own party who certainly are interested in being the next standard bearer of the party.
“I believe that he will project the idea that he intends to run to maintain a certain level of power and position and fundraising, but what someone’s going to do two years from now is impossible to forecast.” It is certainly a threat that the Democrats take seriously. Their impeachment managers warned this week that, unless the Senate acts now to stop him, Trump could renew his assault on democracy. Lead manager Jamie Raskin said: “If he gets back into office and it happens again, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.”
Indeed, Trump has always thrived on the principle that what does not kill him makes him stronger. The Russia investigation and his first impeachment over coercing Ukraine for political favors were both weaponized by him to convince supporters that he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” by the deep state. The second impeachment would surely form part of the same narrative. The clues were there in the arguments presented by Trump’s defense lawyers. Michael van der Veen described the trial as “a politically motivated witch-hunt” and an “unconstitutional act of political vengeance”.
In what sounded like a potential passage from Trump’s reelection campaign launch in 2023, van der Veen added: “It is constitutional cancel culture. History will record this shameful effort as a deliberate attempt by the Democrat party to smear, censor and cancel, not just President Trump, but the 75 million Americans who voted for him.”
Whatever Trump’s future plans, critics fear that a precedent has been set. The upshot of the trial – held at the very scene of the siege – is that a president can lie about an election and incite a riotous mob yet still not endure the ultimate sanction available to Congress. That is Trump’s dangerous legacy. Bardella added: “If you send a signal that someone who vocally led a violent insurrection against American democracy can do so without consequence, you’re only sending the message that he should do this again, that it’s OK: you are condoning that behavior.
“And it’s not just Donald Trump. The people that perpetrated this are extreme and radical and will only see the Republicans like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio as partners in what will be an ongoing effort to continue to destabilise the democratic process.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/13/donald-trump-impeachment-trial-analysis-acquittal

Opinion: Trump’s Republicans, Brought to Their Knees

 

By Frank Bruni
They stand for nothing. The Senate trial proved that.
During the first of the three presidential impeachments in my lifetime, we contemplated the smudging of a blue dress. During the second, the smearing of a political rival.
During this one, which ended with Donald Trump’s predictable but infuriating acquittal? The shrieking of a police officer as a mob crushed and bloodied him. It was rawer and uglier. So is America.But I keep thinking about the late 1990s, Bill Clinton, that whole melodrama and how Republicans used it in the service of a particular identity for their party. I keep thinking about what a lie that identity was then and what an absolute joke it is now.
Republicans sought to define themselves as the caretakers of tradition, the guardians of propriety, the proudly old-fashioned champions of honor, order, patriotism and such. Clinton’s background, especially the accusations of infidelity, helped them do that. They turned him into a symbol of America’s turpitude. They reasoned that the more thoroughly they demonized him (and Hillary), the more persuasively they sanctified themselves.
He was lies and they were truth. He was lust and they were modesty.
Monica Lewinsky dropped into that crusade like a gift from the gods. What you saw on the faces of many Republicans as they discussed Clinton’s dalliance with her wasn’t indignation. It was glee, and it fueled the charade that men like Newt Gingrich — who was then the House speaker and was cheating on his second wife with the much younger woman who would become his third — were the bulwarks against moral chaos.
Chaos. That’s precisely what Donald Trump wrought. Not metaphoric chaos, but actual chaos, deadly chaos, on grueling, gutting display in the footage of Jan. 6 that House Democrats presented at his Senate trial. It showed rioters coming for lawmakers like lions for lambs. (“Hang Mike Pence!” “Naaaaaancy, where are you?!?”) It showed lawmakers fleeing for their lives. It showed stampeding, smashing, stomping, screeching.
TRACKING VIRAL MISINFORMATIONE very day, Times reporters chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online. It showed hell, or something close enough that when all but seven Republican senators shrugged it off so that they could vote to acquit Trump, they finally forfeited any claim to virtue or to “values,” a word that had long been their mantra. They irrevocably lost all rights to lecture voters on such things. They affirmed that they, like Gingrich, were gaseous with hot air all along.
They’re fine with hell, so long as they’re re-elected.
The era of Trump has been the era of Republican unmasking, and many Republicans didn’t have their masks successfully affixed in the first place. This trial and that footage left them nothing to hide behind. What Trump incited — the insanity of it, the profanity of it, the body count — represents the antithesis of everything that the party purported to hold dear.
Trump’s lawyers excused it and gave Republican senators their rationale for acquittal by talking about free speech, but that cast the president of the United States — the most powerful person in the world, entrusted with the security of his country — as just any old crank spouting off. It minimized his station. It trivialized the stakes. It also overlooked that it’s not OK to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, though Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, reminded them of that, describing Jan. 6 as “a case where the town fire chief who’s paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire.” The lawyers also turned history on its head, essentially bookending Trump’s presidency by minting the precise sorts of “alternative facts” that Kellyanne Conway smugly heralded at the start. “Unlike the left, President Trump has been entirely consistent in his opposition to mob violence,” one of his lawyers, Michael van der Veen, said, scaling new summits of preposterousness. Trump blessed mob violence at his campaign rallies. He blessed mob violence in Charlottesville, Va. He’s against mob violence the way I’m against spaghetti carbonara. Which is to say that he thrills to it and eats it up.
Both before and during the Senate trial, Trump’s defenders asserted that there’s no clear causal link between his malfeasance and that police officer’s screams. But the House Democrats effectively destroyed that argument by documenting not only Trump’s words in the days, hours and minutes before the mob attacked but also his long, painstaking campaign to erode trust in democratic processes, so that if those processes didn’t favor him, his supporters were primed to junk them. He’s a study in slow-motion treason. Jan. 6 was simply when he slammed his foot down on the accelerator.
It was also, in retrospect, the climax that his presidency was always building toward, the inevitable fruit of his meticulous indoctrination of his base, his methodical degradation of American institutions, his romancing of right-wing media and his recruitment of the most ambitious and unscrupulous Republican lawmakers. At his behest, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and several other Republican senators promoted the lethal falsehood that the election was fraudulent, yet that didn’t disqualify them from sitting as jurors to render a foregone verdict on a man whose delusions they had already endorsed. What a system. What a farce. They were distracted, cavalier jurors at that. Rick Scott, who of course voted “not guilty,” was seen studying and then fiddling with a map or maps of Asia. Dare we dream that he’s plotting his own relocation there? Hawley, who also voted “not guilty,” at one point moved to the visitors gallery above the Senate floor and did some reading there, his feet propped up, his lanky body a pretzel of petulance. What happened to Republicans’ respect for authority? What happened to basic decency and decorum?
Clinton was a supposedly unendurable offense against that, but then along came Trump, and Republicans decided that decency and decorum were overrated. Truth, too. Heck, everything that they claimed to stand for in the Clinton years was now negotiable, expendable, vestigial. Nothing was beyond the pale.
But that footage was beyond the pale. Did you really look at it, Senators Hawley, Scott and Cruz (yet another “not guilty”)? Did you see the blood and the terror on that police officer’s face? Do you honestly contend that there’s no connection between Trump’s lies — refined over years, repeated incessantly and rendered in the most incendiary fashion possible — and the officer’s pain?
Do you sleep soundly at night?
On Friday, as the trial drew nearer to the moment when senators would render their verdict, President Biden was asked for his thoughts on the proceeding. “I’m just anxious to see what my Republican friends do — if they stand up,” he said.
What a generous statement. Trump brought these Republicans to their knees long ago. Stand? They can barely crawl at this point. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opinion/sunday/trump-republican-impeachment.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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