Opinion: Mitch’s Impeachment Trial Is, Goosey Lucy Goes To the Senate

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Last updated on July 21st, 2023 at 06:20 pm

Working hand in glove with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell is producing a Soviet-style sham trial reminiscent of a Kafka novel.

It’s got the long arduous hours, giving equal validity to evidence laid out by the Democrats and to the slop Trump’s lawyers threw together because they have nothing else to counter the facts.

Contrary to his, and other Republicans’ rhetoric about the Clinton impeachment trial, this one is nothing like it.

For one thing, under Mitch’s rules every piece of evidence must be voted on before it is allowed to be submitted.

The Clinton trial also had witnesses following a prolonged investigation by an independent counsel and unlike this White House, the Clinton administration cooperated with all phases of that investigation.

Republicans are not merely lying to you. To quote, Rep. Jamie Raskin, they are “perpetrating a fraud” on you.

That’s a brutal way of minimizing admissible evidence and intimidating Jurors who dare to stray from the party line. Just how often will they be willing to be seen voting with Democrats to include relevant evidence – in front of a crazed Donald Trump or his cult members?

Mitch’s process makes Star Chambers look like open and fair trials by comparison. But, we really don’t need expertise on Senate rules to understand what’s going on here.

One need only be familiar with the English language to know, thanks to Trump’s own witnesses, that he used the presidency to shake down the Ukraine.

You don’t have to be a lawyer or a constitutional expert to know that the shake-down was intended to influence the outcome of this year’s general election in Donald Trump’s favor. You just have to know your country and your own heart to know that we must choose our president free of influence from hostile foreign powers.

It’s because the facts are so overwhelming that Mitch McConnell wants a “trial” without witnesses or evidence, and going in the middle of the night when most of us will be sound asleep because we have real life responsibilities.

For some of us, watching these proceedings goes with the territory of our real life responsibilities and for some of us it may be tempting to say, “my article tells you all you need to know about this process, the arguments made and whose arguments are valid.”

This is too important to delegate off to opinion-makers, myself included. I urge everyone to take some time to look at the materials for yourselves. If you have a way to record the trial to watch later, do it.

You can read the Democrats’ articles of impeachment, to the Senate, the Trump response to the articles and the Trump brief. The Democrats also responded to Trump’s brief.

Any amount of information you can see and consider for yourself empowers you to decide for yourself if you want to live in a country that makes its own decisions or instead to have someone from the outside imposing their will on you, to their benefit and to your detriment.

Upon answering these questions, you’ll know whether or not we should be going through this process:

Do you want to live in a country where government serves the powerful interests that buy it or a country where the government serves the people?

Should a president be removed from office because he (or some day, God willing, she) cheated their way into the White House and intends to do it again?

Should a president be removed from office because he or she sought help from a foreign power, then tried to cover it up when Congress sought oversight?

While Senators will go through the charade of presenting “both sides”, the fact is we already know this process is rigged in favor of Donald Trump. We know it because the Senate Majority Leader said he’s working with the president to rig the process. We know it because he doesn’t want witnesses and he doesn’t want the people to see the proceeding.

Knowing the attention grabber that Trump is, does anyone really believe that he would turn down an opportunity for all the media to pontificate about him and only him? We don’t need legal briefs or detailed constitutional arguments to know when Trump doesn’t want you to see something about him, it’s because he comes out of it looking bad.

As someone who lives for reading and learning more about law and about politics, I live for moments when the two dance together. But this process that Moscow Mitch is setting up is an outrage. It should anger every American who loves this constitutional republic.

Their so-called response amounts to turning the most basic truths of the American Constitution on their head and with that, they are insulting your intelligence. They’re saying don’t you believe everything you know to be true, nor anything you have seen with your own eyes nor heard with your own ears.

They’re singing the song of tyrants and hoping you’ll be hypnotized by the melody. Honest people don’t do that.