A well-deserved impeachment
The Senate must now do its part to hold Trump accountable for the violent attack on the Capitol.
In voting Wednesday to impeach President Trump — for a second time — the House responded in the only responsible way it could to his outrageous encouragement of the domestic terrorists who invaded the Capitol.
Ideally, the Senate would reconvene on an emergency basis and try and convict Trump before he makes the exit he tried to forestall by lying to his followers about a rigged election. But if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) continues to keep the Senate in recess until Jan. 19, the trial must proceed after Trump’s term ends and Joe Biden becomes president.
Legal scholars can debate whether the Constitution allows an impeachment trial after a president leaves office. But allowing the calendar to save Trump from accountability would send the message that presidents are free to engage in gross misconduct so long as they do it late in their term.
Trump committed an impeachable act when he exhorted loyalists on their way to the Capitol to “fight like hell” and “stop the steal,” which was part of a larger effort to thwart democracy that also included pressuring election officials, state legislators, Congress and his own vice president to overturn his defeat. The weeks of Trump’s incessant and baseless attacks on the integrity of the vote culminated in a violent assault on Congress as it moved to certify Biden’s victory, leading to five deaths, multiple injuries and the desecration of the Capitol.
The president’s video Wednesday calling for his supporters to calm down was welcome, but it only emphasized how reprehensible his remarks were up to and in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot.
Wednesday’s vote to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection” was an indispensable rebuke to a president who has disgraced his office in his efforts to cling to it. The message would have been even more powerful if more Republicans had joined 10 members of their party — including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House — and all 222 Democrats in recognizing that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors.
Convicting Trump will require a twothirds vote in the soon-to-be Democraticcontrolled Senate, which translates to at least 17 Republican votes on top of all 48 Democrats and two independents. It should be an easy call. There is no reasonable way to defend how Trump undermined the public’s faith in elections for his own gain, or how he recklessly stoked the passions of his followers in the hope of intimidating Congress into voiding Biden’s win.
Certainly, House Republicans offered no such defense in their effort to stop impeachment. Instead, they offered a grab bag of unpersuasive arguments that ranged from hollow pleas for national healing to whataboutism to the airing of familiar grievances about “the left,” “cancel culture,” Black Lives Matter, last year’s violence in some cities, Big Tech and the Russia investigation.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who has shamefully abetted Trump’s denial of reality and who supported a preposterous lawsuit seeking to overturn election results, said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the siege of the Capitol. Then he voted to spare Trump from real accountability, after floating the weak alternatives of a fact-finding commission and a resolution to censure Trump.
To rebut the claim that Trump incited insurrection, Rep. Tom McClintock of Elk Grove noted that in Trump’s Jan. 6 speech the president talked about “marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” But that passing reference was utterly overwhelmed by the fiery language of the rest of Trump’s speech in which, as Cheney rightly said, he “lit the flame of this attack.”
The sole California Republican to support impeachment was David Valadao of Hanford, who correctly put the focus on Trump’s actions, not the hasty impeachment process. “His inciting rhetoric was unAmerican, abhorrent, and absolutely an impeachable offense,” Valadao tweeted. “It’s time to put country over politics.”
McConnell said Wednesday that he hasn’t decided how he would vote at an impeachment trial, following a New York Times report that he was pleased that the House was moving toward impeachment. There’s no task more pressing for the Senate at the moment than to hold Trump accountable for the damage inflicted last week, and McConnell should do his part to ensure that the trial begins as soon as possible. But if that reckoning must wait until after Trump leaves office, so be it.