All Trump's Impeachment Defense Has Going for It Is the Essential Cowardice of Republican Senators

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

28 January 21

And that might just be enough.

orty-five Republican senators found a use for the Constitution as a fig leaf on Tuesday. The way we know this is the fact that they pretended to take Senator Rand Paul seriously as a constitutional scholar. (I don't even take him seriously as an ophthalmologist, but never mind.) They were trying to avoid being on the record as to their respective opinions on whether or not a president should be allowed to encourage seditious violence against another branch of the government. This doesn't seem to be a tough question to me, but I am not a miserable, cowardly wretch worried that some QAnon loon will run against me in the next Republican primary.

Paul's point of order that trying the ex-president* in the Senate now is unconstitutional failed, so the trial will open as scheduled on February 9, but that wasn't the point of Aqua Buddha's move anyway. It was a) to give his fellow poltroons cover against the wild kingdom now operating within their political party, and b) to create a vehicle for his fellow poltroons through which they can avoid discussing what actually happened around them on January 6. Basically, it is part of a campaign to minimize the enormity of the high crime of which the ex-president* stands accused, and of which all of them know he is plainly guilty. He fomented insurrection and the people in whom he fomented it knew it all too well. They put themselves on video putting the former president*'s words precisely into action. Up to me? I'd bill him personally for all the damages to the Capitol, not that he'd ever pay the bill anyway.

Trump stands accused of the worst crime of which a president possible be accused—of conspiring against the Constitution he swore to uphold. That crime sticks with him even though he's not president* anymore. (It should be noted that he was still president* when the House of Representatives voted to impeach him.) The only possible comparison that comes to my mind in regard to the gravity of the charges is the treason trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr in 1807. Burr was charged with treason against the United States through a scheme to pry loose what were then considered the "western" states and territories and build an empire there, possibly with the help of Great Britain.

The one overt act in furtherance of Burr's treason was said to have been a meeting at a place called Blennerhassett's Island in the Ohio River, at a point in what is now West Virginia. Chief Justice John Marshall, sitting in on Burr's trial because Marshall also was working as a federal circuit court judge for Virginia, ruled that the jury only could convict if they could prove that Burr's activities on the island were treasonous. The Chief Justice refused to consider a conspiracy charge without an overt act. (Marshall, a great Federalist, was not inclined to give Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson any breaks). Unfortunately for the prosecution, Burr's defense team elicited testimony proving that Burr was 100 miles away from Blennerhassett Island on the day on which he was alleged to have been planning his treason. Burr was acquitted.

To pursue the parallel perhaps further than is wise, the ex-president*'s defense doesn't even have the advantages that Aaron Burr had in 1807. His incitement to sedition occurred on television. There is video of the ensuing seditious acts in which the rioters announce that they were storming the Capitol at his invitation. All the ex-president*'s defense has going for it is the essential cowardice of the Republican minority in the Senate, and alas, that's probably enough.