Trying an impeached President even a former President is an challenging task at best. When the ex-President being tried is a publicity starved former television reality show host, it presents an array of additional challenges. These go far beyond the usual issues that would naturally be raised in such a procedure. President Donald Trump’s goal in these serious proceedings is to place the Constitution, the Congress, and America’s legal institutions on trial and not himself as the defendant.
Having failed to keep Joe Biden from becoming President, having failed to totally overturn the presidential transition, and having encouraged his blind supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump is now determined to refocus the nation on him after being out of the limelight for almost a month. Even before he was banned on Twitter, no one expected Trump to ride off into the sunset. The former President is determined to try to have the proceedings beginning today in the Senate to be all about him and not about whether he committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The proceedings do raise some fascinating legal questions. With respect to the key issue, it appears that an overwhelming number of exceedingly reputable legal scholars of all persuasions are absolutely convinced that an impeached president who leaves office can still be tried. Perhaps what most of the scholars recognize more than anything else is a factor that transcends their legal positions. If the Senate were to decide that the trial of Donald Trump cannot be held because he no longer is President, it would set a dangerous precedent for future Presidents’ invulnerability to prosecution during their final days in office.
Similarly, it is elementary constitutional law even to the claim that President Trump is being denied his First Amendment right to free speech for his remarks on the mall on January 6. It is an absurdity to allege that inflaming his followers to take over the Capitol is acceptable and thus protected free speech.
Looked at in the big picture, however, the crisis in American politics today is far more serious than the confrontation that is being exposed in the Senate Chamber. The fact remains that there are elected political leaders in the country who are unwilling to admit their complicity with what Donald Trump has done to the institutions of American Government. National leaders remain prepared to exonerate Donald Trump for his actions on January 6 and by doing so are abdicating their responsibility for acquiescing in his four-year reign of destruction of the governing system of this Republic.
Repairing the damage that Trump has done will only begin after this trial is concluded. It will remain to be seen if there will be any Republican “profiles in courage”. This is not a call for any ideological shift or policy change, it is whether the GOP has within it any leaders who are prepared to put their country and their conscience on the line against a segment of the American population which has drunk the Trump kool-aid. Congresswoman Lynn Cheney and nine other Republican Members voted to impeach in January and Senator Mitt Romney voted to convict in the first impeachment trial.
Perhaps it is time to revisit the famous remarks of the English Catholic historian Lord Acton but to see them in a fuller context. It his letter to the Anglican Bishop Creighton about holding all people including political and religious leaders to anti-corruption standards, Lord Acton wrote:
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
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