With Donald Trump decamped in Palm Beach, Congressional Republicans could not appear more ready to rid themselves of him. In a telling party line, senators across the caucus are defending the former president from conviction in his pending impeachment trial not on the merits of his lame-duck conduct but rather on the implications of doing so.
More astute minds have rejected the notion that impeachment proceedings are legally valid once a president is out of office, and senators like Tommy Tuberville, the Alabamian who voted to overturn democratically decided election results, suddenly claim to care about unity, opposing impeachment on the grounds of ripping apart the party.
Republicans are looking for an out from the impeachment question, and Democrats shouldn’t let them. This means holding a proper trial complete with subpoenaed witnesses. Let those who reportedly heard of Trump planning his big lie that the election was stolen long before Election Day testify under the penalty of perjury. Corroborate Sen. Ben Sasse’s assertion that he heard Trump was “delighted” as he watched his followers storm the Capitol. Find out just why it was Mike Pence who authorized the National Guard to quell the chaos and whether or not the former vice president had to do so because Trump would not.
But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are reportedly considering a three-day trial. President Biden, who ran on unity, likely doesn’t want a partisan showdown over an ex-president derailing his own busy agenda, and most Republican officials would rather not answer the impeachment question at all.
This is a mistake. Trump’s conduct warrants a full trial, one that offers Republicans zero excuses to claim his misconduct was bad but not properly proven, or procedural outs.
Do this not just to save the Republican Party from itself, but because a landmark precedent is about to be set. Trump voiced a reportedly premeditated lie that the election was stolen for two months. He invited a maskless mob to Washington and told them that if they didn’t “fight like hell,” then they’d lose the country. He then may have abdicated his duty to defend the Constitution by not authorizing the National Guard to stop what probably amounted to a domestic terrorist attack. If such a dereliction of duty does not constitute an impeachable offense simply because it happened so close to the end of his presidency, then any president can abuse their office in any manner so long as they wait until the final fortnight of their term.
As a matter of pure self-interest, conservatives should demand Trump be disqualified from future federal office. Trump cost the GOP the White House and both chambers of Congress, and whatever merits of “Trumpism,” be it his productive foreign policy in practice or his reductive isolationism in theory, the former president proved himself too traitorous to his own party to be a successful agent of Trumpism’s lasting policy successes.
But the precedent of rendering what can be best described as light treason should transcend political interests. That means that the Democrats now in charge of setting the calendar ought to force the hands of their Republican colleagues, lay out all the evidence, and force them to decide whether the proven charges against Trump are really not disqualifying.
