Month: January 2021

There are many reasons it’s constitutional to convict an impeached former president. Here’s the simplest and strongest one:

Some Republicans, having run out of other excuses, have trying to hide behind one last desperate measure to avoid holding Trump accountable: claiming it’s unconstitutional to conduct impeachment proceedings over a former president.

Numerous esteemed legal scholars have knocked down this excuse on several grounds, including that nothing in the text of the Constitution bars Congress from impeaching, convicting and disqualifying former officials from holding future office, and that such a standard would signal to future presidents that they are impervious to consequences for any action they take during a lame-duck period,.

Those are strong and compelling arguments. But there’s an even stronger and simpler one: Because the Founding Fathers said so.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that a sitting president shall be removed from office upon conviction by the Senate. If a president is convicted, removal is automatic, instantaneous, non-optional, and requires no additional action by the Senate. They’re convicted, they’re gone, period. For all intents and purposes, conviction of a sitting president is indistinguishable from removal – they are one and the same.

Aside from removal, the only other penalty the Constitution allows the Senate to impose is disqualification from ever again holding federal office. This penalty is levied by taking a second vote; if a majority of Senators agrees, the former president is disqualified.

Read what I just wrote: “the FORMER president is disqualified” …

And that’s it right there in a nutshell. This second vote for disqualification is taken AFTER the vote on conviction and removal. This means that, at the time the second vote on disqualification is taken, the impeached president is no longer president. Therefore, the Senate is voting to penalize a FORMER president.

Why does that matter? Because it is proof positive that the Founding Fathers granted Congress the right to retain its jurisdiction over a former president even after he leaves office and that the fact that he is no longer in office does not revoke jurisdiction or halt impeachment proceedings begun when he was still president.

Conservative Republicans are quick to insist that we must look to the Founders’ “original intent” when interpreting the Constitution. In this case, the Founders’ original intent is right there in plain English.

So, while there are many reasons that the Republicans’ argument against trying and convicting Donald Trump post-presidency fails, the simplest one is “Because the Founders said so.”

Over the past few years, many of my friends, even those (and often especially) those who considered themselves “woke,” cautioned me not to be so hard on their Trump supporting friends and family insisting that they aren’t really racist or worthy of contempt, but just misguided or ignorant and, aside from their Trump-humping, are “really sweet people.”

I reminded them that good people don’t join forces with evil, that enabling a hateful white supremacist and being good people are incompatible traits, only to be met with admonitions to be more open-minded and patient with them. They just couldn’t seem to understand or respect that racism is or should be a deal-breaker and a desire for unity never justifies tolerating intolerance.

But in the past few days, after watching those “good people” turn into a vicious, bloodthirsty lynch mob, many of those folks have changed their tunes.

I appreciate and share my friends’ pain and anger. But I also urge them to consider why supporting a president who provokes a riot is a bridge too far, but supporting a president who foments racism and hate isn’t?

And I ask them now, do you finally understand what Black and Brown people have been trying to tell you? Do you finally feel – or at least empathize with – the pain we’ve been feeling?

Can and will you, in the future, take us more seriously and stand with us when we say, ‘NO! I will NOT make nice with these people!” even if joining us in calling these people out might make your next neighborhood get-together, family dinner, or Facebook exchange of cute baby and animal pictures uncomfortable for you?

Because if you do, that means you are really waking up and are a true ally. But if you’re willing to draw the line at riots but not at racism, you might need to reconsider whether you’re really the kind of person you think you are.

Dear Republicans:

Stop acting surprised that the national nightmare you’ve supported and enabled for the last five years, in one of his final acts as president, sent a lynch mob to the U.S Capitol to try to take down the government in his name. You are responsible for this.

Yes, yes, I know. You didn’t agree with everything he did or said. (Or as you so often said when confronted with his latest racist diatribe: YOU wouldn’t have worded it that way – which always made me wonder, how exactly WOULD you word blatant racism?).

And yes, we all know that you supposedly felt – or at least claimed to feel – an obligation to support him because, after all, he WAS the leader of your party. And you DID like his policies – tax cuts, right wing judges, less regulation, blah blah blah. So what’s a little racism, xenophobia, calls for violence, child abuse if they let you get the goodies you want, right?

But let’s be clear and let’s be frank. If you are still making these excuses, you are full of it.

First. You didn’t support Donald Trump because he shares your political philosophy. Donald Trump doesn’t HAVE a political philosophy. He’s not a conservative and he is not a Republican. Donald Trump has only two life purposes and they are all consuming: 1) spreading his hatred and racism ; and 2) feeding his insatiable malignant narcissism. That’s it. Period. Everything else is BS. And anyone with half a brain knows it. And since you’re not stupid, you surely know it, too.

And you can be sure that if Trump for one second thought that the Democratic Left would satisfy those two desperate needs of his, he would abandon the Republican Party in a minute, declare himself a liberal and register as a Democrat without another thought.

And here’s another thing Republicans who got themselves wrapped around Trump’s axle still don’t seem to understand – or at least you still refuse to admit. You think you were just using him to get what you want, but somewhere along the way, he unexpectedly morphed into a monster and, try as you might, you lost control of him. You claim you tolerated his bigotry and crassness and lies and cruelty and criminality because he gave you right wing judges and tax cuts and less regulation. And he wasn’t Hillary.

But it was the other way around. You didn’t lose control of him, because you never had control of him in the first place. He had you at “birtherism” and you happily went right along for the ride over that cliff.

Trump used you and you let him.  He didn’t give a damn about your tax cuts and judges. He only cared about getting what he wanted and you eagerly gave it to him, long after it should have been clear what and who he is. You didn’t unknowingly create a monster. You willingly and knowingly opened the front door and let a full-blown monster into our home. And last week that creature spewed out his rabid, foaming spawn into the sacred halls of the center of our democracy, looking for blood and finding it.

You didn’t create this creature – he was a fully-formed monster when you let him in. But he does belong to you and so does the mess he created. And it’s long past time you stop ducking responsibility, making excuses, and pretending you had no idea it would come to this. It came to this the first time you looked the other way and turned a blind eye to Donald Trump’s evil because you thought there was something in it for you.