Trial over but politics isn’t
FROM PAGE 1
and may be looking to his own place in history -- defected and voted to convict the President of impeachable crimes. Ten months from the election, Trump has unified his party around him in Washington and in the heartland at a time when questions are mounting about the Democrats’ willingness to unite after what could become a bruising primary race.
Trump is enjoying the best polling of his presidency -- he hit 49% in a Gallup presidential approval poll this week. His State of the Union address on Tuesday night was a ringing statement of intent that he will use every device of his office to ensure he wins a second term.
Yet Trump didn’t emerge from the impeachment saga untouched. Polls showed that around half of Americans wanted him removed from office. Taken with the Gallup data, they paint a picture of a nation split down the middle on the president.
It’s not only Trump that emerged from the damaging saga more powerful. The presidency itself was enhanced, after the Senate effectively endorsed Trump’s use of institutional power for personal political ends and his blanket policy of ignoring a congressional investigation. That will have huge implications for future Presidents but it also provides an immediate arsenal of new power that this one can deploy right away.
Trump’s acquittal also factored immediately into the presidential race -- with former vice president Joe Biden seizing on Trump’s escape to elaborate on his core theme that the president is unfit for a second term, as he targets a comeback after a weak performance in the Iowa caucuses.
“I can’t imagine being president of the United States and having all one party plus someone from your own party vote to say you should be thrown out of office and view that as a victory,” Biden said in a CNN town hall on Wednesday in New Hampshire ahead of the Granite State’s primary next week.
Democrats have been laying political groundwork for Trump’s acquittal for months in the certain knowledge that there would not be a two-thirds majority to convict him in the Senate.
They built a rhetorical argument that Republicans were covering up for the president by refusing to vote for witnesses, like former national security adviser John Bolton, and blocking further investigations.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, rolled out the oven-ready strategy before the Senate held its final two academic votes -- on articles of impeachment alleging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“The verdict of this kangaroo court will be meaningless. By refusing the facts, by refusing witnesses and documents, the Republican majority has placed a giant asterisk, the asterisk of a sham trial, next to the acquittal of President Trump, written in permanent ink,” Schumer said.
“Acquittal in an unfair trial with this giant asterisk, the asterisk of a sham trial, is worth nothing at all to President Trump or anybody else.”
The “anybody else” Schumer is referring to may include vulnerable Republican senators in swing states, such as Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, who voted to acquit Trump and will now face an avalanche of Democratic attacks meant to anger suburban voters who are worried about his unchained use of power.
But Democrats were not the only senators who faced difficult decisions. The White House believed up until the vote on Wednesday that it might peel a couple of votes from Schumer’s ranks to support its talking point about a looming bipartisan acquittal.
That didn’t materialize.
No one was more aware of the political perils of impeachment than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who held off pressure for such a step for months over the Mueller report.
Trump’s apparent abuse of power over Ukraine, first revealed by an intelligence community whistleblower, made Pelosi’s own political position against impeachment unsustainable.
But the speaker is keen to turn the focus back to the strategy and issues that helped her recapture the House in the midterm election.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries was also an impeachment manager in Trump’s trial. But he tried to turn attention away from Ukraine during a news conference on Wednesday.
Jeffries announced Democrats would bring legislation to the floor soon on promoting the rights of workers to organize, to lower health care costs and to negotiate more affordable drug prices.
Such goals might actually require the Democrats in the House to work with the president -- who they accuse of coming into the chamber in the State of the Union address and Tuesday and firing off a barrage of lies and misinformation.
Three cases will be argued before the Supreme Court on March 31 focusing on Trump’s contention that a House of Representatives committee and a New York City prosecutor are powerless to enforce subpoenas to obtain his financial records. Lawyers for Trump argued that the Constitution renders sitting presidents immune from all criminal investigations and that even if he shot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue prosecutors would be powerless to act while he was still in office.
The Supreme Court eventually could be called upon to decide another major case now awaiting a ruling in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In that one, the Justice Department argued that senior presidential aides are immune from congressional subpoenas for testimony like one issued by the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee to former White House Counsel Don McGahn.
The rulings in those cases could set enduring legal precedents.
The Supreme Court previously curbed presidential power in key cases.
In 1997, it ruled that President Bill Clinton could not evade a civil lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, a woman who accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. In 1974, it ruled against President Richard Nixon’s bid to avoid handing over audiotapes and other material to a federal judge as part of a criminal investigation into the Watergate corruption scandal.
During the impeachment trial, Trump’s legal team argued for an unconstrained presidency. They also said that the charges brought by the House - abuse of power and contempt of Congress - did not cover conduct that amounted to impeachable offenses.
They argued that if a president trying to win re-election believes he is acting in the national interest, any quid pro quo - a Latin term meaning a favor for a favor - arrangement aimed at boosting his election chances cannot be impeachable. They also argued that an impeachable offense must be a violation of a statutory law.
Democrats said this sweeping assessment of presidential power would embolden Trump and future presidents to act with impunity.
It remains to be seen whether such arguments will win favor at the Supreme Court, whose 5-4 conservative majority includes two justices appointed by Trump.