Sir, you said in your diary
And I am conscious of the fact that I would have a specific role to play as a sworn, impartial juror should an impeachment be tried in the Senate. If charges come to the Senate, I will approach them and the trial with the same seriousness that I had when I participated in the Clinton impeachment trial. I would not prejudge the case one way or the other should it come to this.
Respectfully, I disagree that you are or were ever supposed to be an impartial juror in the case of impeachment. While I expect you and your colleagues to treat this with a seriousness and professionalism that the Republicans never did with the Clinton impeachment by no means are you or your colleagues capable of being impartial. I am also not asking you to approach this issue with the already made up minds of your Republican colleagues. I do, however, expect you to not ignore the plentiful, indeed, overwhelming evidence and information about the impeachable offences of this administration in some kind of pretense of fairness and impartiality. Please follow me below the fold for my argument against your assumption of impartiality.
Under no system of just jurisprudence would you or your colleagues be allowed to be jurors in such a trial.
You are one of the very few people in this country who are elected to serve with the President and Vice President in running this country. This very fact on its own would disqualify you and the other 99 Senators from being a juror.
Your job requires you to do oversight of the very people who would be impeached. No one who is involved in oversight would ever be allowed to be a juror in any fair trial in this or any other country that values a fair and professional justice system.
You and your colleagues are the political allies and opponents of the very people who would be impeached. No judicial system would allow political allies or opponents to be jurors in a trial.
You and your colleagues are privy to any and all the information that passes through the House and Senate with regards to the impeachable actions that would be tried. No juror would be chosen after having that kind of access to the raw data of the trial.
You have what I consider a dysfunctional idea of your role in this matter. Your role is not to be an impartial juror. Your role is to be an explicit political check on the executive branch of government. If our founding fathers had wanted impeachment to be only for criminal acts and to be a fair and professional judicial act they knew very well how to set it up so it would be so. They chose to pick a political branch, the United States House of Representatives, to indict (impeach) the various political officials. They also chose to pick a political branch, the United States Senate to hold the hearing to decide whether to convict on the charges the House brought against the official being impeached.
I am offended by the idea that an informed and intelligent United States Senator has not formed an opinion on whether this President or Vice President or even AG Gonzales have committed impeachable acts.
This is on par with Clarence Thomas saying he didn't have an opinion on the outcome of Roe v Wade. It is quite frankly unbelievable.
Edit. He has said they may have committed impeachable acts. I'm still offended he's not sure if they have or haven't committed such acts.
We have an administration that is and has held your branch of our government with contempt. This administration is taking dictatorial power and challenging you to do something about it. They have progressively gotten worse throughout this administration from the moment they were selected by the Supreme Court. They have defied anyone who chose to challenge them. Unfortunately few if any of our elected officials have stood up against this unprecedented assault on our form of constitutional government.
There is no way you can help but prejudge this impeachment. You are hearing testimony about this matter when oversight committees do their job. The only way you can avoid this is to stop doing your job.
This faux fair and balanced idea of our politics is destroying our country. You are not there to have a tea party where all are courteous and polite to each other. You are there to uphold the oath to office you took to the constitution. You are there to serve the people who elected you into office. You are not there to be "bipartisan" with people who have told you to your face that they will do anything to shut you down and have. You are there to be firm and strong against this modern day creeping fascism that has entered our politics.
Your duty is impeachment or as our founding fathers put it
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Sir, this administration and their Republican cohorts have stated their goal of one party control of our government. They have chosen to break the laws of this country to reach their goal. They have deeply shamed this country by attacking another country without cause and lying to the American people and their legally elected representatives to do so. They have deeply shamed this country by using methods no civilized country would acknowledge using. They have refused to acknowledge the constitutional authority of the legislative and judicial branches of government except when these branches rubber stamp their actions.
As Barbara Jordan so eloquently put it
We know the nature of impeachment. We've been talking about it awhile now. It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account. It is designed to "bridle" the executive if he engages in excesses. "It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men."² The framers confided in the Congress the power if need be, to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a President swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the executive.
If any administration fits this description this one does.
James Madison again at the Constitutional Convention: "A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder.
We are on a path to despotism. Are you going to follow the oath you took and do the duty so clearly laid out in the Declaration of Independence by using the tool our founders gave to you in just such a circumstance Impeachment or are you going to continue to pretend this is nothing beyond politics as usual and the next election will solve all these little deviations.
Barbara Jordan speech on impeachment