GOP lawmakers don’t believe in any venue to hold Trump accountable
At least 11 GOP senators who voted not to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial in February 2021 referred to him as a “private citizen,” claiming obliquely or explicitly that they didn’t have the power or jurisdiction to convict a man who was no longer president of the grave offenses he openly committed against the country. Alabama’s Richard Shelby’s sentiments were common: “the Constitution speaks of removing a sitting president, not a private citizen.”
This spineless cop-out, and the subsequent absence of a vote to bar Trump from ever holding public office, has left us in this position of having a fraudster who has taken the most concrete steps to terminate American democracy since the Civil War now a major-party front-runner again. Yet it also unwittingly made a separate case: if impeachment was not the proper place to convict a former president, then naturally a federal court, which has jurisdiction over offenses committed by non-presidents, is the proper venue, right?
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There’s no possible way that those same craven senators, who waved their awesome responsibility away, would be against Special Counsel Jack Smith, a federal prosecutor, now bringing charges — backed up by ample evidence already — that were approved by a grand jury and are slated to be heard in a federal courtroom before a jury, as the law calls for when it comes to private citizens? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. They will obviously twist themselves into pretzels to claim that it’s this process that’s political, actually.
Wyoming’s John Barrasso, the chair of the Senate Republican Conference, said back then that his no vote on impeachment was “consistent with my duty to the Constitution, I opposed this impeachment trial of a private citizen and former president.” After Smith’s indictment of Trump this week on charges related to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Barrasso said the public “are uncomfortable watching the current president weaponize the justice system against his political opponent.” So, you can’t impeach and try private citizen Trump in the House and Senate, but he can’t be tried in the federal courts either. It’s almost like these officials believe that Trump should face no consequences by any means.
Like many of his colleagues, Barrasso also absurdly brought up a U.S. attorney’s recent deal with Hunter Biden over charges of gun possession and tax evasion, which Republican lawmakers crowed was a Joe Biden-directed sweetheart deal (ignoring that it was reached by a Trump-appointed prosecutor) and which fell apart for technical reasons.
Among these was the unusual requirement, rejected by Delaware Federal Judge Maryellen Noreika (also a Trump appointee), that she be the one to oversee Hunter Biden’s compliance with conditions the agreement set, a stipulation the defense pursued in part out of concern that a potentially reelected Trump would order his Justice Department to arrest his political rival’s son whether or not he complied. If anything the deal spoke to concerns over Trump’s, not Biden’s, weaponization of the Justice Department.
Not that any of these facts actually matter. A controlling subset of the GOP now exists in thrall to Trump, and to point out their increasingly strained rationalizations and hypocrisy is to miss the point. They know, and they don’t care.
—New York Daily News Editorial Board
