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The Ghost Who Hovers over Trump’s Sham Trial

If Republicans hear Margaret Chase Smith whisper to them, they should listen.

Michael Harris 23 Jan 2020TheTyee.ca

Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker. Author of Party of One, the bestselling exposé of the Harper government, his investigations have sparked four commissions of inquiry.

Donald Trump’s cartoon presidency has boiled down to a choice between two fictional characters: Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

From where I sit, it looks like the U.S. Senate is about to cast its fate with the Evil Empire. Mitch McConnell has not set out to discover the truth, but to demonstrate to the Democrats the power of the Dark Side.

And only the ghost of Margaret Chase Smith can rescue truth and the rule of law from the corrupt process now unfolding. Who is she? If you don’t know, we’ll meet her a bit farther down.

Sham of a trial

McConnell’s lesson in Dark Side methods begins with the continued bastardization of the language. Presiding Judge John Roberts, top banana of the U.S. Supreme Court, has already scolded both sides in this impeachment charade about using inappropriate language.

I agree. But the word that should be proscribed at these proceedings is not “pettifogging” as the Chief Justice said. All lawyers practice false emphasis in trivial matters in their duty to apply the law to the benefit of their clients. The word that should be banned is “trial,” and all that it implies. All of the false equivalencies.

No one who knows the slightest thing about either language or the law would ever call the game of political power ball playing out on the Senate floor a trial. A trial is essentially a finding of fact that allows a judge or a jury to come to a verdict. Central to that process is evidence, sometimes circumstantial, sometimes direct, that is presented to the court through witnesses and exhibits.

McConnell specifically came up with rules for Donald Trump’s impeachment “trial” that will end in WrestleMania justice, a legal sham that would put to shame anything the World Wrestling Entertainment has ever staged for the amusement of its credulous fans.

In vote after vote, the Republicans have already rejected any attempt by the House impeachment managers to gain new information by subpoenaing witnesses and documents. No records from the White House, State Department, the Office of Management and Budget; and no Mick Mulvaney, no Don McGahn, no John Bolton. Instead, several GOP Senators accused the House of not doing its work before impeaching the president.

The handy part that these same Republicans leave out is that the White House refused all cooperation with House investigators, even though the House has the sole authority under the Constitution for oversight of the president on the matter of impeachment. The point isn’t that the House didn’t do its work. The point is the White House made that work impossible, just as Richard Nixon tried to do in another era. Trump obstructed justice by refusing to hand over a single document requested by the House committees looking into the “drug deal” with Ukraine’s President Zelinsky — already appropriated military aid in return for digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The President also directed potential witnesses from the administration not to obey lawful subpoenas.

Trump’s hope was to force the impeachment battle into the courts. That would have triggered a Byzantine legal process that would stretch out beyond this November’s presidential election. Now Mitch McConnell and company are an active part of Trump’s obstruction. They are allowing the president to be the judge in his own cause. There is no more basic violation of judicial principle than that. Separation of powers is in tatters with the Senate’s abasement at the feet of the president.

Only a stand-up comic could call the Republicans in the Senate “jurors” and “judges.” Again, the process borrows the jargon of the law, but not the substance. In essence, a juror is an impartial judge of the facts. But McConnell stated publicly on Fox News that he was in “total coordination” with the White House on Trump’s Senate trial. How could the very man setting the rules for the impeachment “trial” boast of partnering with officials who serve the accused?

So help them God, lol

In plain English, the Senate Majority Leader is working hand-in-glove with the defendant in this case, a state of affairs so egregiously unjust that it even bothered Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. It is a fish that stinks from the head.

That much should have been crystal clear before the impeachment process moved to the Senate. McConnell himself said on national television that he was “not impartial at all” in the case under consideration. Senator Mark Meadows said the same thing, telling CNN’s Dana Bash before the opening arguments of either side had even been heard, that what the House managers were presenting was a “false narrative.”

My question: How could either of these men take the oath administered by the Chief Justice to be impartial jurors and judges in the Trump impeachment? They both swore to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws, so help me God.”

How could Senator Lindsey Graham be sworn in with those words when he said before the process began, “I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”

It is puzzling that no Republican juror was challenged before taking the oath because of previous prejudicial statements they made about the House case against the president. Had that been done, Chief Justice Roberts would have had to make a ruling, as reported in The Hill. How could the presiding judge not have ruled to remove a juror like Senator Graham for uttering a false oath? Or the others?

Instead, no one was challenged, and the kangaroos are running wild in Trump’s impeachment trial. The sad arithmetic of injustice is 53 to 47, the size of the Republican majority in the Senate. It only takes 51 votes to acquit President Trump. That is exactly what they will do just as quickly as gall, corruption, self-interest, and Executive coaching will permit.

The ghost in the room

There is an outside chance that there may be a few patriots and persons of conscience who could stop that process cold. There is historical precedent.

Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith did that back in 1950 with her Declaration of Conscience. She took on Senator Joe McCarthy, denouncing his vicious demagoguery before anyone else had the courage to confront his campaign of bigotry and hatred.

She denounced the bitterness and selfish political opportunism of McCarthy, a fellow Republican, writing that Americans were sick of seeing guilty people whitewashed. Instead of cover-ups, smears and witch hunts, Senator Chase Smith urged her fellow senators not to think of the next election but of their country; think, that is, not as politicians, U.S. senators, men or women, but as Americans.

The signs are not hopeful that enough Republican senators or individuals with special knowledge of President Trump’s shady activities in Ukraine will stand up and be counted. If no profiles in courage emerge, the Senate will do its partisan duty and the catch-me-if-you-can president will waltz away from his misdeeds again. He will be “acquitted.”

In that bonfire of integrity, President Trump, his Senate enablers and his followers will milk the resonance of that word “acquitted” for all it is worth.

They will say that the failure of the House impeachment case in the Senate is proof that the whole thing was a witch-hunt. They will say that the president is twice vindicated: once by the ponderous report of Robert Mueller, which was drowned like a kitten in the basement by the justice department’s deceitful roll-out. And now again by the “verdict” of Trump’s Senate “trial.” The perpetrator will walk, but only as far as November.

That’s when the real jury will weigh in. Will voting Americans, even those who supported Trump in the past, endorse a rigged trial without evidence and witnesses? Will Britain lose a Prince, and America gain a King?

Only if the greatest democracy on earth has become a chicken-fried serfdom in thrall to a nickel-plated billionaire with a flair for lying.  [Tyee]

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