Name: House Democrats Made The Case To Impeach Trump. His Legal Team Made Threats.
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House Democrats Made The Case To Impeach Trump. His Legal Team Made Threats.

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×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost Politics. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×The second trial of began Tuesday with a detailed and emotional argument from the House impeachment managers for why the has the constitutional authority to try the former president. Their argument featured a video of the as directed by Trump, including footage of a rioter being shot. They described brutal violence against police officers. Rep. (D-Md.) recounted how his daughter and son-in-law, who had come to watch the counting of the electoral votes, feared for their lives amid the rampage.Trump’s team responded with incoherence, threats and excuses ― a harbinger of what’s to come as the Senate continues its trial of the 45th president. AdvertisementAt the end of the day’s proceedings, the Senate voted, 56-44, that it was constitutional to hold the trial. Of the six who voted to continue, only one, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, switched sides after previously opposing the trial, yet the vote confirms that most GOP senators are eager to let Trump off the hook for encouraging the riot. But the House’s argument was so compelling and emotional, bringing some senators to tears, that it caused Trump’s lawyers to scramble their strategy, as attorney Bruce Castor admitted at the end of his rambling opening defense statement. “We changed what we were going to do because we thought that the House managers’ presentation was well done,” Castor said.After Castor’s strange and sometimes incoherent 50-minute opening speech, Trump’s defense turned to lawyer David Schoen to make a clearer, and more dangerous, argument to let Trump escape consequences. Schoen launched into an angry, culture war defense of Trump by attacking the impeachment in the exact same language that Trump used to deny the results of the 2020 election and incite the Jan. 6 insurrection for which he’s been impeached.AdvertisementTrump’s impeachment, approved by 222 and 10 Republicans in the House on Jan. 13, Schoen said, was part of an agenda “by a group of partisan politicians seeking to eliminate from the American political scene and seeking to disenfranchise 74 million-plus American voters.” (These Trump voters could, of course, vote in a future election even without the former president on the ballot.) This directly echoes Trump’s election lies that led directly to the sacking of the Capitol.“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it,” Trump said on Nov. 4 in one of his first post-election lies about the results of the Nov. 3 election.In his culture war screed featuring references to “cancel culture,” “deplorables” and the physical display of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book,” Schoen declared that Trump’s second impeachment trial was a purposeful, partisan ploy by the Democratic Party, now in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, to tear the country apart and assault those who don’t support its agenda.“[T]hey know the so-called trial will tear the country in half, leaving tens of millions of Americans feeling left out of the nation’s agenda, as dictated by one political party and now holds a power in the White House and our national legislature,” Schoen said.He then added that this coming division had but one precedent: the Civil War. “This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we’ve only seen once before in our history.”AdvertisementThe first day of the impeachment trial was meant to debate the constitutionality of the Senate holding an impeachment trial of a former president. The House managers focused their case around an argument against what they called a “January exception” to the Constitution.The “January exception,” explained Raskin, the lead manager, is what Trump’s lawyers would create if their argument that a former president cannot face a Senate trial for actions committed while in office is accepted.“It’s an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door ― including using violent means to lock that door ― to hold on to office by any means necessary,” Raskin said.Such an exception would allow presidents, as Trump did, to try their best to change the results of an election they lost, including directing their supporters to march on the Capitol as members were inside counting the electoral votes for their opponent or to commit any other political crime.Advertisement“What will that mean for America?” Raskin asked. “What will the January exception mean to future generations if we grant it? I’ll show you.”Raskin then showed a 13-minute video showing the timeline as Trump called on his supporters to march on the Capitol and the horrific violence those pro-Trump supporters committed once they stormed the building.“The president was impeached for doing that,” Raskin said when the video ended.What followed was a deliberate argument based on the original context and textual meaning of the Constitution’s impeachment clause in favor of the position that former officials, including the president, may be tried for impeachment for acts committed in office. This originalist argument was aided by citations to conservative lawyers including former federal appeals court judge Michael W. McConnell, Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi and Chuck Cooper, who in recent days have affirmed that ex-presidents may be impeached and tried for actions taken while in office.Raskin began with the Constitutional Convention, noting that when the Framers debating impeachment, they did so with knowledge of impeachments of ex-officials and did not dispute such impeachments at any point.When Virginia’s George Mason raised the impeachment in England of former Governor General of Bengal Warren Hastings as an example, Raskin noted, “not a single Framer” objected.AdvertisementAlexander Hamilton, Raskin noted, argued in Federalist No. 69 that the president “would stand upon no better ground than a governor of New York, and upon worse ground than the governors of Maryland and Delaware.” The governor of Delaware could be impeached only after leaving office, meaning that Congress’s power to impeach the president while in office was an expansion of the impeachment power in that state.Beyond the era of the Framers of the Constitution, there are the precedents of impeachment of ex-officials throughout U.S. history.Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), another House impeachment managers, explained the impeachments of former Sen. William Blount in 1798 and . In Blount’s case, the Senate voted to dismiss the impeachment based on the understanding that members of Congress could not be impeached. But Blount notably stated that he could not make the argument that he could not be impeached and tried because he was no longer an official.As for Belknap’s case, Neguse called it “the most important precedent this body has to consider.”“When his case reached the Senate, this body, Belknap made the exact same argument that President Trump is making today ― that you all lack jurisdiction to try him,” Neguse said. And the Senate voted 37-29 to hold the impeachment trial of Belknap.AdvertisementIn addition, Neguse argued that the Constitution nowhere prohibits the impeachment and trial of ex-officials. Instead, in Article I, which covers Congress, the impeached individual is described as a “person” and a “party,” not a “civil officer,” as in Article II.“We know the founders gave a lot of thought to the words that they chose,” Neguse said. “They could have written ‘civil officers’ here, but instead they used broader language.”And to the question of whether the punishments for impeachment of removal from office and disqualification are linked or separate potential punishments, Neguse argued that there is no language requiring that one flows from the other.“The Constitution does not say ‘and then’ disqualification,” Neguse said. “It doesn’t say ‘followed by’ disqualification.”Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) then argued that Trump must be impeached, convicted and disqualified from holding future office as his crime was exactly what the impeachment power was meant for.Advertisement“Impeachment is not merely about removing someone from office,” Cicilline said. “Fundamentally, impeachment exists to protect our constitutional system.”But it was Raskin who , the day of the insurrection. The day before, he had buried his middle son, Tommy, . He invited his daughter and his son-in-law to come watch as he worked as a manager during the counting of the electoral votes in the House. As the insurrectionists began to break through the Capitol’s defenses, his daughter and son-in-law hid in a congressional office. Separated from them on the House floor, Raskin hunkered down as he listened to “the sound of pounding on the door like a battering ram.” The members fled, but his daughter and son-in-law were stuck in the office where they made what they thought could be their final phone calls. “They thought they were going to die,” Raskin said. His daughter later told him she never wanted to come back to the Capitol.“People died that day. Officers ended up with head damage and brain damage. People’s eyes were gouged. An officer had a heart attack. An officer lost three fingers that day. Two officers have taken their own lives. Senators, this cannot be our future,” Raskin said. “We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementCORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the number of Democrats who voted for Trump’s impeachment and the date of his impeachment.Suggest a correctionNewsletter Sign UpHuffPost's top politics stories, straight to your inbox.Successfully Subscribed!Realness delivered to your inbox

×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost Politics. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×The second trial of began Tuesday with a detailed and emotional argument from the House impeachment managers for why the has the constitutional authority to try the former president. Their argument featured a video of the as directed by Trump, including footage of a rioter being shot. They described brutal violence against police officers. Rep. (D-Md.) recounted how his daughter and son-in-law, who had come to watch the counting of the electoral votes, feared for their lives amid the rampage.Trump’s team...

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House Democrats Made The Case To Impeach Trump. His Legal Team Made Threats.

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