On Monday, the always-inevitable U.S. Senate acquittal of President Donald Trump’s U.S. House impeachment charges barreled further along toward its natural conclusion.
“The impeachment trial of President Trump drew closer toward its almost-inevitable conclusion with closing arguments Monday, as Democratic House impeachment managers made a last-ditch push to convince the Senate that an acquittal would be a ‘death blow’ to the ability to hold a president in check, while Trump’s defense team accused the Democrats of engaging in a rushed, partisan, unjustified endeavor,” Fox News reported.
The outlet is predicting that Trump’s formal acquittal vote may happen as soon as Wednesday — seemingly as good a guess as any.
House impeachment manager Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) “addressed an argument put forth by Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz, who claimed that Trump was working in the national interest, and not his personal interest, by asking Ukraine to investigate possible corruption related to former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter,” the cable news giant continued. “Dershowitz asserted that even if Trump was acting to aid his own re-election if he believes his re-election to be in the nation’s best interest, it would be proper.”
Another prominent Trump impeachment defense attorney, former federal judge and Clinton-era special counsel Ken Starr, also argued earlier on Monday against a freewheeling, exceedingly broad interpretation of Congress’ impeachment power — including those impeachments haphazardly attempted with little substantive grist to back them up.
“They’ve got the power, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes,” Starr said on the Senate floor, as Fox News noted. “Did the House Judiciary Committee rush to judgment in fashioning the articles of impeachment? Did it carefully gather the facts, assess the facts, before it concluded we need nothing more than the panel of very distinguished professors and the splendid presentations by both the majority counsel and the minority counsel? What was being said in the sounds of silence was this: we don’t have time to follow the rules.”
In a New York Post op-ed over the weekend, I decried the Democrats’ partisan impeachment effort as “pathetic” and “worse than a waste of time”:
After months of hype and pseudo-drama ginned up by the left, public and secret testimony and breathless “smoking-gun” headlines, it’s taking the Senate just two weeks to bring an end, finally, to the impeachment circus. And it is ending with the always-inevitable acquittal of President Trump.
What a tragic, monumental waste of time it has been. After all, anyone capable of rudimentary arithmetic could have seen this foreordained outcome coming from Day One. …
Alas, to call it a mere waste of time is likely far too charitable. The Democrats took stock of the decrepit state of our national politics, the bitterly fractious nature of our partisan tribalism, the pathetic regard the American people have for their Congress and took a sledgehammer to it all. The most immediate tangible result of this failed gambit will be to only further coarsen and debase our politics. …
Most damaging of all, the Democrats’ pursuit of the draconian remedy of impeachment based on their claims of Trump’s corrupt subjective intentions on a diplomatic phone call has set a truly reckless precedent for the future. The general conduct of foreign policy is a core Article II function constitutionally vested in the president, and soliciting a “quid pro quo” while acting lawfully amounts to constitutionally protected free speech.
For Democrats to argue that Trump’s purportedly corrupt motive somehow transmogrifies such constitutionally protected conduct into an impeachable offense is nothing short of astonishing. Their zeal to impeach for what amounts to a policy disagreement over a diplomatic phone call reeks of the “maladministration” impeachment standard the Framers deliberated and then conscientiously rejected at the 1787 constitutional convention.
Democrats are making their final #impeachment arguments right this second.
But there's no way around it. This whole sham has been a waste of time and resources.
Move on. https://t.co/6pHIece54X
— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) February 3, 2020