The Heat Is On

Here was the full exchange. Last week, Collins said she thought Trump would be “much more cautious” and had been criticized by both sides and that is “pretty big lesson.” I asked if she thinks he still may have learned a lesson. -> pic.twitter.com/ONXn8eedcJ

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 12, 2020

It's at this point I have to remind people that an impeachment trial in the Senate is not a judicial proceeding (THAT should be obvious, huh?).  In a judicial proceeding, only evidence presented to the court under strict rules of evidence can be considered.  The trier of fact is required to pay attention only to the crimes alleged, or the incident leading to the particular civil claim.

A Senate impeachment trial is not so constrained.  For one thing, again as recent experience has shown us, the trial is not constrained by Federal Rules of Evidence.  No trial in Federal court could proceed on arguments alone, and without presenting evidence that could be examined critically (the Senate just decided the evidence wasn't all that compelling because...evidence is BOOORING!  And they didn't want the trial to take up their valuable time of...doing nothing at all.  Seriously.  What legislation has the Senate passed in 18 months?).  This said, the Senate can consider not only the allegations brought against the President, but the actions of the President.  And everything Trump has done in the days since he was acquitted by the Senate, has been consistent with his actions before the Senate rejected the charges brought by the House.

Sen. Collins is down the barest of fig-leaves here:  Trump can't be the first President to be removed from office because that's never been done and so precedent is no action by the President is serious enough to remove a President from office absent an election.  She's not even saying the charges by the House were unproven or the evidence was insufficient; she's just saying it can't be done because it's never been done and so it will never be done.

And that's as grave a problem for the persistence of our form of government as anything AG Barr is doing in the courts right now.  It's a grave problem not because of one Senator from one state, but because it is so clearly the sentiment of so many Senators from so many states.  Rather like Trump, who won't pardon Manafort or Flynn or Stone because he doesn't want the responsibility for it (who cares about Dinesh D'Souza, after all? or that Sheriff in Arizona whom nobody remembers anymore?), Senators don't want the responsibility, either.

And frankly, we all abdicated responsibility in 2016 by not bothering to vote because Hillary Clinton, amirite?  All the fingers we point leave four more pointing back at us.

If we're going to keep this republic, we've really got to get better at it.