January 6, 2021 will go down in history as the date a president of the United States tried to stay in power by inciting an insurrection in which five people, including a law enforcement officer, were killed.
February 13, 2021 will go down in history as the date the United States Senate let him get away with it.
And make no mistake about it. It was both sides of the aisle that let him get away with it. Pay no attention at all to what the vote for or against conviction was.
Up until a few years ago, I would frequently act as a judge in collegiate mock trial tournaments. One of my pet peeves was that the students would meticulously build up their arguments, and just when they got to the point where they were on the precipice of hammering it home, they would just assume everyone knew where their argument was leading and stop, figuring that the jury would know what to do with what had been handed to them.
The house managers and senate democrats did exactly that today, just as they have done so for years.
Anyone who practices law knows that the only way to convince a jury is to bludgeon them with the facts. Subtlety, as I have told the unfortunate college student attorneys who have had me as a trial judge, does not work. It has not worked in the past. It is not working now. It will not work in the future. You must put your jury in a position in which they have no choice but to vote in your favor.
In this instance, the only way you were going to get the senate republican jurors to vote to convict would be to outrage the American public with the facts of the insurrection so badly that the republicans would fear for their jobs so much that they would have no choice but to convict him.
And that required witnesses.
Lots of them.
All of them.
I thought the house managers had finally gotten it right this morning when they moved to call Jaime Herrera Butler, the G.O.P. representative who was going to testify as to the conversation had between Kevin McCarthy and cadet bone spurs in which the cadet made it clear he did not care if the mob got to all the congressmen and the vice-president in the Capital on January 6, 2021 and did whatever to them. Remember, a gallows and noose had been erected on the Capital grounds by the mob. Rep. Butler literally begged for other patriotic G.O.P.ers to come forward, assuming there were any. We now know there are a total of seventeen. Ten in the House who voted for impeachment. Seven in the Senate who voted to convict.
I really thought we were headed somewhere when the Senate voted to hear witnesses. The only way to get a conviction here was to have Rep. Butler testify, followed by anyone who volunteered to testify about the events of the day, followed by Kevin McCarthy, and ultimately followed by Mike Pence. By then, the outcry would have been such that I have little doubt that the G.O.P. would have begun believing that to save their hides, which is the only thing they really care about, they had to convict. The only way cadet bone spurs would get out of it would be if there was no testimony.
And the democrats caved.
They agreed to a stipulation that what Rep. Butler had said the night before about the conversation between cadet bone spurs and Kevin McCarthy was true in exchange for her not being called to testify and that no other witness would be called either. Considering that the G.O.P. simply wanted no witnesses at all, they got exactly what they wanted. They could now vote to acquit on the grounds that there was no jurisdiction to even try cadet bone spurs even though that vote had already been taken and jurisdiction established, without addressing the merits of anyone's testimony and dealing with the potential ire of the public.
And the democrats let it happen.
So what if the republicans would have tried to call "one hundred witnesses".
LET THEM.
I bet every one of the witnesses they wanted to call, including Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Hilary Clinton and Casey Stengel for that matter, would have been more than happy to comply, testify and pour even more fuel on the ex-president's funeral pyre. I for one would have also been entertained by Casey Stengel testifying considering his performance before the Kefauver Committee sixty years ago. We all know what the G.O.P. did today was a bluff. They were not going to call a single witness, even Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris, because they could not afford to allow them to continue to bludgeon cadet bone spurs, which is exactly what would have happened, which would have put them all in a position in which to save their own seats they would have eventually had no choice but to vote to convict. So they huffed, puffed and bluffed.
And the democrats fell for it.
I am beyond disgust.
They should all rot in hell.
Even the democrats.
