#impotus45

Trump Impeachment for Kids 

Remember, remember the 18th of December ⚖️

#ImpartialJuror Rand Paul told the Hill 5 days before Trump’s Impeachment Trial  — this

“I really think the verdict has already been decided as well. I don’t think any Republicans are going to vote for impeachment,”

— Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) - Jan 16, 2020

Americans “should remember their senator’s flaws accordingly when casting a ballot this fall. Voters are jurors, too.“

The crimes that lead to impeachment, after all, would make the process inescapably political. “The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused,” Hamilton wrote. “In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” 

The Senate, designed and structured to be a more deliberative and dispassionate body than the House, would best resist these forces.

But the Framers’ insights can only take us so far. The Senate that existed in Hamilton’s era is a far cry from the Senate today. In the early republic, senators were chosen by state legislatures and represented their interests in the nation’s capital.

In a country where elected leaders are the norm, Hamilton wrote, those who wield the impeachment power could “be too often the leaders or the tools of the most cunning or the most numerous faction,” and that they may not “possess the requisite neutrality towards those whose conduct may be the subject of scrutiny.”

“The Constitution’s structure does not account for other elemental forces that shape our politics today.”

The Framers expected that senators would be accountable to their consciences and their state legislatures. They did not anticipate that the president could call upon a hyper-partisan media infrastructure to keep his supporters ignorant of his crimes, or that he could use a party-primary system to influence the political futures of the jurors who would decide his own. 

“The impeachment process that was created in Philadelphia in 1789 is not designed to operate alongside a wealthy donor class that can withhold re-election funds from lawmakers who vote the wrong way, so to speak, and shower their largesse upon more loyal alternatives.”

Republican senators have every reason, for example, to oppose hearing from witnesses like John Bolton or Mick Mulvaney. If their testimony would aid Trump’s cause, it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have forced them to testify himself.

Senators facing re-election fights in 2020