1/13/21: With just one week remaining
in his first and, hopefully, only term in office, Trump makes history again.
On a vote of 232 to 197, with nine Republicans and one former
Republican voting in favor, and four others abstaining, Lame Duck Don gets
impeached a second time. The grounds include violating his oath to uphold the
U.S. Constitution (see below), inciting a deadly riot, and trying to force
Georgia officials to overturn certified election results. (See: 1/2/21 and 1/10/21.)
____________________
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully
execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of
my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
States.”
Oath or affirmation required of all presidents
____________________
Future school history books will describe the impeachment
process, as set up under the U.S. Constitution, and will include a picture of
this guy:
Senate Majority Leader McConnell, releases a statement. “The Senate process will now
begin at our first regular meeting following receipt of the article from the
House,” meaning when the Senate is back in session January 19. He also admits
that he is open to voting for conviction.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer asks McConnell to
bring senators back into session immediately.
McConnell declines.
If you have any brains in your head, you should understand
that Loser Don deserves to be impeached, even if it might prove no more than symbolic
in the end. And if you really follow the news, you know he should have been
canned when he pressured Ukraine in 2019, and put U.S. national security at
risk.
This second try is different, though, because even many Republicans
have awakened. Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the party in the U.S.
House of Representatives, issues a blistering statement to explain why she voted in
support of Trump’s removal from office.
Referencing the shocking attack on Capitol Hill, she writes:
Much more will become clear in
coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the
United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this
attack. Everything that followed was his doing.
None of this would have happened
without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully
intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater
betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the
Constitution.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, also votes to impeach.
“There is no doubt in my mind that
the President of the United States broke his oath of office and
incited this insurrection,” he says in a statement. “So in assessing the
articles of impeachment brought before the House…if these actions – the Article
II branch inciting a deadly insurrection against the Article I branch – are not
worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”
Rep. John Katko of New York is equally clear: “It cannot be
ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection.”
Certainly, the risk for Republicans who vote to impeach is great,
but not the political risk alone. Rep. Pete Meijer, 33, of Michigan,
newly-elected, and a Republican, becomes the target of death threats when he is
the only freshman in his party to vote to impeach Donald John Trump.
“We realize that was a vote we
cast that put our safety at risk and going forward, I am expecting there will
likely be more political violence,” said Meijer. “So my expectation and the
expectation of some folks I’m talking to who are trying to vote our conscience
on this, there will be folks that try to kill us, and that’s something we have
to grapple with every day.”
Rep. Meijer noted that one GOP colleague told him that he or
she wanted to vote to uphold Biden’s electoral win. Concern “about the
safety of that individual’s family” dissuaded him or her from taking the risk. “That
is where the rhetoric has brought us,” Meijer said with sadness.
“That is the degree of fear that’s been created.”
The same pressures will be there when the upper house receives
the fresh impeachment resolutions and Republican senators decide to vote. In
the U.S. Senate, Ben Sasse has said he is considering a “yes” vote.
Sen. Mitt Romney is likely to vote to impeach, since he was
the only Republican the first time to agree that Trump should be removed.
*
IN AN OPINION PIECE for the Daily Beast, former aide and
confidant to the First Lady, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff savages her former boss
and longtime friend (she attended Melania’s wedding and the baby shower
preceding the birth of Barron, Mrs. Trump’s only child).
Wolkoff calls the attack on January 6 “shocking, awful,
disheartening and shameful.”
“It was an assault on human life and our great
democracy,” she continues. “Unfortunately, our president and first lady have
little, if any, regard for either.” The Trumps, writes Wolkoff, “lack
character, and have no moral compass. Although my intentions to support
the first lady in the rollout of her initiatives were always pure, I’m
disheartened and ashamed to have worked with Melania.”
And so it goes.
*
MEANWHILE, with right-wing groups still threatening violence to
come, 25,000 U.S. troops have been sent to Washington D.C. to keep the peace.
Today, Rep. Brian Mast led National Guard troops on a tour of
the Capitol. Mast, a Republican who lost both legs in combat, thanked Guard
personnel for their service. At the same time, troops were warned that extremist
groups promising to protest the election might deploy improvised explosive devices (IED’s) in the
nation’s capital. So the soldiers should be vigilant.
Good news: President Trump gets our fighting men and women
mostly out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bad news: President Trump’s own actions make it necessary to
deploy our fighting men and women in America’s streets.
*
Handcuffed, as it were, to the insurrectionists by their own
words and false claims of massive voter fraud, the worst of the worst of the GOP
(generally speaking, those most tied to Trump) did their best to slip the
restraints. With evidence piled high against them, their only choice was to go
for misdirection. There were the usual high points and low points during the House
impeachment debate. One of the lows came when Rep. Ken Buck (R-Co.) tried to defend President Trump’s conduct leading up to the
riot by pointing out that “the socialists in Hollywood” had been mean to the
president all along. Robert DeNiro, Buck complained, had said “he wanted to
punch the president in the face.” And poor Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders had been asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia before she and her
family were served.
So, rioting on Capitol Hill? A policeman killed and scores
injured. A president inciting a riot. Sure, Sanders not getting to order her
entre. Just as bad.
If Rep. Buck was pathetic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
elected to Congress for the first time in November, from the Fourteenth
Congressional District of Georgia, was an idiot, grabbing as much spotlight as
she could.
Rep. Greene announced that she would introduce impeachment charges
against President Biden on January 21.
Other Trump supporters have been reduced to denying that
Trump supporters were involved in the January 6 attack at all. No less a
political weaselˆˆ than Rep. Matt Gaetz has peddled the myth that the attack
was the work of leftist Antifa radicals. This line of elephant poo was cleaned up
today, during debate on the Articles of Impeachment. Just minutes after Gaetz
stood in the House of Representatives to repeat that brazen lie, House Minority
Leader Kevin McCarthy shot it down. McCarthy made it clear he did not support
an impeachment charge.
Still, his explanation was in no way a defense of the president.
Trump, he said, bore “responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by
mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what
was unfolding.”
“Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There is
absolutely no evidence of that,” Rep. McCarthy added. “Conservatives should be
the first to say so.”
McCarthy also admitted that it was not “the American way” to
contest a fairly-decided election. “Let’s be clear, Joe Biden will be sworn in
as president of the United States in one week because he won the election.”
Amen.
(ˆˆNote: This writer tries at all times to avoid the use
of dehumanizing language. In the case of Rep. Gaetz, labeled a “political weasel”
above, a rare exception may be justified. That is, while he is still a human
being in good standing, in terms of his politics he is a “weasel.”
I’m not sure this meets my standard; but I let it
pass here. I believe Gaetz is the kind of person who would have followed Hitler
or Fidel Castro or any dictator, had he lived in their time and place, and
thought he would benefit if he did.)
