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Entry tags:
political nonsense
So the Senate of the United States last night, nearly along party lines, voted to make its decision on the removal of a President, perhaps the most momentous vote its members will ever take, without hearing from a single witness or seeing a single piece of evidence, except those the House managers replayed in their opening statements. As I understand it, no previous impeachment trial in U.S. History, whether of Presidents or of Federal judges, has been conducted without witnesses or evidence. Two Republican Senators, but not three, were allowed to "vote their consciences" in favor of evidence; if it had been three, there would have been a 50-50 tie, to be broken by the Chief Justice, who might (if his concern really is for the perceived legitimacy of the trial) have ruled in favor of hearing evidence.
Republicans offered a lot of silly justifications for refusing to hear evidence, and didn't publicly offer the one good one: the "jury" had already made up their minds, and evidence wasn't likely to change any of them, so it would have been a waste of the Senate's and the country's time to hear from witnesses or see documents. [Actually, Senator Murkowski, widely considered a possible swing vote in favor of witnesses, said something like this: "I came to the conclusion that there would not be a fair trial. The Senate has failed," just before casting her own vote impeding the ability to have a fair trial, and abetting the Senate's failure.) Or, to put a slightly different tilt on it, the jury had already made up their minds, and didn't want to be faced with evidence that might make their predetermined decisions harder to justify. Clear majorities of the American people, in several recent public opinion polls, have supported the Senate hearing evidence, but I guess the Senators decided they'd rather explain to their constituents why they didn't hear evidence than why they ignored it.
The game isn't entirely over: there's an argument under the Senate rules that the House managers can petition the Chief Justice to call witnesses, and if he chooses to do so, it's not subject to override by the Senate. Whether he would choose to do so (as an institutionalist, at the risk of Republicans accusing him of partisanship) or not (at the risk of Democrats accusing him of partisanship), nobody knows. Whether this worked would depend on the Senate Parliamentarian, and there would be debate over whether the Senate's adherence to its own rules can be appealed to the Supreme Court, and if so, the Chief Justice would have to recuse himself from ruling on his own action, and so on....
More likely, the relevant House committees can issue their own subpoenas to John Bolton, Lev Parnas, Mike Mulvaney, Pat Cipollone, Mike Pompeo, Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump, all of whom are first-hand witnesses to the events under investigation. (Cipollone, as a witness, probably should have disqualified himself from serving as a defense attorney.) The first two of these have already expressed their willingness to testify before the Senate, and I suspect they'd accept testifying before the House as a second-best option. The rest would presumably fight it in court, and those court battles might go on into 2021. (The Administration would presumably fight in court to block Bolton's testimony, but it has no basis for blocking Parnas's, since he wasn't an Executive Branch employee and shouldn't have had access to classified information. And Bolton might simply defy the Administration's orders the way Vindman, Hill, Yovanovitch, Sondland, etc. did.) It won't be in time to affect the Senate's decision, of course, but it wouldn't have affected that decision anyway. And whatever testimony the House does hear would be public knowledge before the election. Trump and his team would presumably spin this as "they failed to tear down the President with their Russian collusion hoax, they failed to tear down the President with their impeachment hoax, and they're so desperate that they're trying again with yet another pitiful hoax"... but if you worry about what names the President is going to call you, you can't get anything done.
Republicans offered a lot of silly justifications for refusing to hear evidence, and didn't publicly offer the one good one: the "jury" had already made up their minds, and evidence wasn't likely to change any of them, so it would have been a waste of the Senate's and the country's time to hear from witnesses or see documents. [Actually, Senator Murkowski, widely considered a possible swing vote in favor of witnesses, said something like this: "I came to the conclusion that there would not be a fair trial. The Senate has failed," just before casting her own vote impeding the ability to have a fair trial, and abetting the Senate's failure.) Or, to put a slightly different tilt on it, the jury had already made up their minds, and didn't want to be faced with evidence that might make their predetermined decisions harder to justify. Clear majorities of the American people, in several recent public opinion polls, have supported the Senate hearing evidence, but I guess the Senators decided they'd rather explain to their constituents why they didn't hear evidence than why they ignored it.
The game isn't entirely over: there's an argument under the Senate rules that the House managers can petition the Chief Justice to call witnesses, and if he chooses to do so, it's not subject to override by the Senate. Whether he would choose to do so (as an institutionalist, at the risk of Republicans accusing him of partisanship) or not (at the risk of Democrats accusing him of partisanship), nobody knows. Whether this worked would depend on the Senate Parliamentarian, and there would be debate over whether the Senate's adherence to its own rules can be appealed to the Supreme Court, and if so, the Chief Justice would have to recuse himself from ruling on his own action, and so on....
More likely, the relevant House committees can issue their own subpoenas to John Bolton, Lev Parnas, Mike Mulvaney, Pat Cipollone, Mike Pompeo, Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump, all of whom are first-hand witnesses to the events under investigation. (Cipollone, as a witness, probably should have disqualified himself from serving as a defense attorney.) The first two of these have already expressed their willingness to testify before the Senate, and I suspect they'd accept testifying before the House as a second-best option. The rest would presumably fight it in court, and those court battles might go on into 2021. (The Administration would presumably fight in court to block Bolton's testimony, but it has no basis for blocking Parnas's, since he wasn't an Executive Branch employee and shouldn't have had access to classified information. And Bolton might simply defy the Administration's orders the way Vindman, Hill, Yovanovitch, Sondland, etc. did.) It won't be in time to affect the Senate's decision, of course, but it wouldn't have affected that decision anyway. And whatever testimony the House does hear would be public knowledge before the election. Trump and his team would presumably spin this as "they failed to tear down the President with their Russian collusion hoax, they failed to tear down the President with their impeachment hoax, and they're so desperate that they're trying again with yet another pitiful hoax"... but if you worry about what names the President is going to call you, you can't get anything done.