Impeachment called ‘show trial,’ but GOP seems divided
Washington — Congressional supporters of former President Donald Trump on Sunday denounced his upcoming Senate trial as unfair and unconstitutional, while Democrats argued that holding the ex-president accountable for provoking last month’s Capitol riot is a grave moral and political necessity.
Republicans have declined to defend Trump’s actions, which included directing his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 as then President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory was being certified. But in a preview of the trial that is to begin this week, they are mounting a variety of procedural arguments to attack it, including the insistence that the House of Representatives acted too hastily in impeaching Trump just a week after the attack.
They also argue that the Senate doesn’t have the constitutional authority to convict a former president.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., seizing on the speed of the House action, likened the Senate trial to a Stalinist-era proceeding. “If this happened in the Soviet Union, you would call it a show trial,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Even though Senate Republicans are expected to rally behind Trump and deny his accusers the 17 GOP votes likely needed to convict, the rift within the party over the former president’s conduct — and his backers’ feverish fealty — was on full display on Sunday’s news talk shows.
Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who joined nine other Republicans in voting to impeach Trump, said the ex-president’s actions surrounding the siege of the Capitol merited not only impeachment, but criminal investigation. In the single article of impeachment, Trump is accused of inciting the deadly attack, in which hundreds of his followers breached the stately edifice, ransacked offices and sent lawmakers scurrying for safety.
Cheney, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” pointed in particular to Trump’s Twitter denunciation of then-Vice President Mike Pence even as rioters were in the building, with some in the mob attempting to hunt him down to prevent him from fulfilling his ceremonial duties in certifying Biden’s win. Trump falsely claimed that Pence could overturn his defeat.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing,” Cheney said. “They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway — whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
Cheney intensified her criticism of Trump on Sunday even though her impeachment vote drew attacks from Trump allies who sought unsuccessfully to eject her from her leadership post.