So, apparently there was a procedural vote on moving forward with an impeachment trial, which passed 55-45! Great news, right? WRONG. News coverage of this vote has heralded it as a major loss for Democrats, and pretty much every outlet including MSNBC and Washington Post take the vote as evidence Republicans will not vote for conviction after an impeachment trial is held next month of insurrection leader and two time popular vote loser Donald Trump.
Instead of highlighting that before a single shred of evidence has been presented at an impeachment trial, Democrats have already garnered 30% of the Republican votes they need to impeach, we are force fed the conventional wisdom that the Republicans won’t convict. The coverage is breathless. Only 5 republicans voted for the trial! They will never get the 17 total needed to convict! Or so we are now being instructed to believe. We all know that if the shoe were on the other foot, with 5 Dems crossing lines to impeach a president of their own party, the headline would be “Dems in disarray” and “portends great risk”, etc .etc.
So, what do Democrats do when faced with this huge fissure in the Republican caucus that they could drive a wedge deeply into? They follow the worst lesson of the Obama era, by trying to compromise first with Republicans rather than press their advantage and hold their feet to the fire.
Today, we learn that Sen. Tim Kaine (D-milquetoast VP nominee) is proposing a censure resolution as a preemptive compromise with Sen. Susan Collins (R-furrowed brow of concern) that purports to bar Trump from running for office in the future. The censure resolution, while lifting language from the 14th amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists, would have dubious impact that could be challenged.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor, said invoking the 14th Amendment provision is “much more complex than some people assume” and said simply passing a resolution as Kaine is proposing would not be sufficient to bar Trump from office.
“I worry about the cop-out of a condemnatory censure, which Senators shouldn’t be led to think gets them off the hook of having to convict the former president under the Article of Impeachment,” he wrote in an email.
Kaine acknowledged the legal ambiguities but argued that they are no more daunting than the legal issues Trump would raise were he to be convicted and barred from future office.
Just to recap… two time popular vote loser, twice impeached former President Trump systematically undermined a fair and free election for months. And when that didn’t work, he organized and foisted an angry mob on the Congress in an insurrectionist attempt to stop the recognition of those results which killed 5 people and injured more than a 100 officers.
And now, Sen. Kaine thinks a censure is fine.
Might i suggest to any fighting Democrats left out there that read this… give a little ring-a-ling to your Senators and tell them what you think about accountability for murder and insurrection.