So the Democrats in the House of Representatives (and including several Republican members either so fearful or so unprincipled as to join them) have passed an article of impeachment against the out-going president. It is alleged that he “incited” a “coup,” or “insurrection” against the constitutional processes of electing a successor.
I’m old enough to remember the scenes from inside the Wisconsin state capitol, where for weeks on end the public business was disrupted by people who, unbidden, occupied the building and refused to leave. We were — sneeringly, of course, always with a sneer — told, “This is what democracy looks like.” Apparently democracy no longer looks like that. [15 Jan 21, 1449 CST Update: And here’s the WaPo opinion piece on that little episode.]
I have not seen any specific words of the president quoted in which he encourages anyone to use force to enter the U.S. Capitol and then exercise any sort of violence of any kind, character, or description. And no, you don’t get to claim that merely encouraging his supporters to appear at the Capitol to protest the culmination of a successful theft of a U.S. presidential election is “inciting” a “coup” or an “insurrection” or even a “riot”. In fact, by the commonly accepted definitions of summer 2020 what went down in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, was not even a “riot”; it was at the most a “mostly peaceful protest”.
Whatever. The feller who may well turn out to have been the last pro-American U.S. president will be leaving office on January 20, 2021, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of everyone who lives and works in the nation’s capital will be all cock-a-hoop to see him go. He was a threat to their very way of life, and from the supreme court all the way down they weren’t having it. What happened on November 3, 2020, was the Establishment’s very basic reminder to the American people of who is in charge, and who is not (plot spoiler, kiddoes: it’s not the American people).
After contradictory reports of whether soon-to-be-former Senate Majority Leader McConnell of Kentucky did or did not support removing Trump from office, or did or did not support having the impeachment trial before the end of Trump’s term, it now appears that there will be no Senate trial before the Potted Plant struggles through whatever is on the Telepromptr screen in front of him. I understand, however, that the Plan is to “impeach” Trump at some point after he is no longer in office, with the idea of preventing him ever from holding any other federal office (as if Trump is likely to beg someone to appoint him to be postmaster of East Jesus, Arkansas).
The relevant passage from the U.S. Constitution on impeachment is in Article I Section 3, and runs like this: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.”
Notice how the text phrases it” “two thirds of the Members present”. It doesn’t say two-thirds of the senators, but only two-thirds of those “present”.
There are a lot of very contemptible Republican senators right now, people who more or less sold this president down the river whenever they thought it safe to do so. With him out of office, his supporters fired from their jobs, the on-going purge of conservative voices from public spaces, and so forth still going full-bore (cf. the comments of the CEO of Twitter: “We are focused on one account [@realDonaldTrump] right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go beyond the inauguration. We have to expect that, we have to be ready for that. So, the focus is certainly on this account and how it ties to real-world violence. But also, we need to think much longer-term around how these dynamics play out over time. I don’t believe this is going away anytime soon.”), it is now safe to turn on him out in the open.
But many of these Republicans come from states which voted massively in favor of the man they intend to give over unto his oppressors, and if they vote to “convict” a guy no longer in office, then aren’t they risking their own hides? Perhaps, and perhaps not.
Imagine, if Gentle Reader will, our hypothetical craven Establishment Republican. Too frightened to vote to “convict” and too full of vindictiveness not to. But hist! What if one announces, “This whole nonsense is so farcical, so thoroughly contemptible, so plainly unwarranted under the Constitution, that I am not going to dignify it with my presence, for by being present I would necessarily concede the proceedings a legitimacy to which they are in no manner entitled.” Nice, principled stand, isn’t it?
Except our hypothetical Establishment Republican has just reduced the vote necessary to “convict”. If all 100 senators vote, up or down, then it will take 67 — two-thirds of one hundred — senators to “convict”. There are 50 Democrat senators. That means at least seventeen Republicans would have to stand up and cast a vote which they would then have to explain to their — in many cases, heavily Republican — constituencies. But if 25 Republican senators take that “principled” stand, then the 50 Democrat senators “present” will together make up that two-thirds majority. They can (and will) all vote together as a bloc and “convict,” and not a single Republican will have to incur the odium of both participating in this farce (and it will be) and then voting to do down the only president since Reagan who was unequivocally on Our Side of the Fight. The Republicans “present” can all vote “No,” and the 25 or more who aren’t even there can pretend that they stayed away from a wounded sense of constitutional propriety.
All very neat.
And all very, very predictable.
So who will be the 25 who will stay away?