the trial and its effects

wv wrote:

I also think another reason no witnesses were called is because
the Dems were afraid of something. They were afraid of what
the REP Witnesses would say about Dems.

I think that is pretty much the only reason. The core reason, at least.

If they called witnesses, testimony would have led to people identifying significant complicity (at best) or even collaboration within the GOP and the police. It would have devastated the GOP.

And I think they went to the Dems and said, “If you do this, we are going to take as many of you out as possible, and we won’t be confining ourselves to January 6 events. We will throw everything we have at you and destroy the ability to govern anything. We will make as many casualties as we can on our way down.”

That’s what I think happened.

But I don’t know. I’m often wrong when I speculate, so that’s why I asked for any articles anyone may come across that shine light on this question.

WSWS Offers Its View

It’s an op-ed, and much longer on claims than on evidence, as usual.

Democrats’ impeachment cover-up leaves coup-plotter Trump emboldened
Andre Damon
10 hours ago
The US Senate voted Saturday to acquit President Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection” in connection with the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.

The verdict marks a milestone in the breakdown of American democracy. A president sought to overthrow the separation of powers and install himself as dictator, and Congress refused to take the most basic action to hold him accountable.

By voting to acquit, 43 Republican senators gave aid and comfort to a fascist coup attempt. Their votes showed what they would have done had Trump succeeded: they would have endorsed and supported the overthrow of the Constitution.
Trump’s “legal” defense was a combination of incompetent sophistry and raving hysterics, making the fascist argument that his insurrection was the outcome of—or even the appropriate response to—left-wing demonstrations against police violence. Trump lawyer Michael Van der Veen declared that the Capitol riot was “pre-planned by fringe left” groups.

Emerging from the impeachment trial emboldened, Trump stands secure in his position as the head of the Republican Party. “Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican Party,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, gloated on Fox News Sunday. “The Trump movement is alive and well.”

This outcome was aided by the Democrats, who sabotaged Trump’s prosecution. The Democrats purposely protected Trump’s co-conspirators. This includes the 147 Republican House and Senate members who voted against the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, along with those who provided the political framework for the January 6 insurrection with charges of a “rigged” election. It also includes those forces within the state who secretly worked with Trump to orchestrate a stand-down of federal forces on January 6.

Throughout the trial, the Democrats begged and pleaded with the same Republicans who encouraged and took part in Trump’s drive to overturn the election.

The Democratic impeachment managers never once addressed themselves to the American people or sought to explain the political strategy behind the insurrection. They did not once mention what was happening inside the Capitol while Trump was inciting the mob–the objection by one congressman and senator after another to the electoral vote totals certified by the states in an election Trump lost by over seven million votes.

The only reference to the Republicans’ objections during the entire trial was a video played by the Democratic impeachment managers of the rioters ransacking the desks of members of the Senate, in which one of the insurrectionists declared that Republican Senator Ted Cruz was “with us” because he backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

The Democrats also deliberately excluded any discussion of why the rioters were allowed to overrun the Capitol without any opposition from the tens of thousands of National Guard and federal military forces stationed in and just outside Washington. The day after the riot, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said that his request to deploy the Maryland National Guard to Washington to support the Capitol police was held up for 90 minutes by the acting secretary of defense, who had been installed by Trump after the November 3 election. It was only the secretary of the Army who gave the authorization to release the Guard.

Yet there was no investigation of which elements in the military chain of command facilitated the stand-down and whether this was done at the orders of Trump.

Even as they limited their case to Trump’s actions alone, the impeachment managers kneecapped the prosecution on even the extremely limited, legalistic grounds for impeachment they had set out.

On Friday night, Washington Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican, released a statement making clear that Trump actively supported the insurrectionists in a phone conversation with Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. According to Herrera Beutler, when McCarthy pleaded with Trump to stop the attack, Trump openly sided with the insurrectionists, saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

With the Democrats in control of the Senate, not only Herrera Beutler, but dozens of other people with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and the stand-down of federal forces could have been subpoenaed and forced to testify under oath.

But despite winning a vote to bring Herrera Beutler and possibly other witnesses to testify, the Democrats abruptly backtracked, hastily bringing the trial to an end less than 24 hours after Herrera Beutler’s statement.

The record of Trump’s first impeachment—centered around the Democrats’ differences with Trump over foreign policy—spanned thousands of pages. The impeachment process unfolded over a period of three months, including many witnesses called before the House committees considering the charges.

But after the greatest assault on constitutional government in the country’s history, the Democrats devoted less than a week to the Senate trial, on the grounds that the impeachment was a distraction from other legislative priorities. This claim was proven to be a complete fraud when the Senate adjourned for a week immediately following the impeachment vote, and senators left town for the recess.

It is worth comparing the way in which the second impeachment of Trump was conducted with the investigation of the Watergate scandal under the Nixon administration. The Senate hearings that began in February 1973, chaired by Democratic Senator Sam Ervin, led not only to Nixon’s forced resignation in the face of virtually certain impeachment, but also to the exposure of FBI and CIA involvement and the criminal conviction of nearly two dozen people. And all that was triggered by a single burglary carried out by five people, in which no one was injured, let alone killed.

The Iran-Contra hearings in 1987 also had significant consequences. The investigation revealed that the Reagan administration flagrantly violated the Boland Amendment, passed by Congress to prohibit US government assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras. It also exposed the existence of the Rex 84 plan for the mass detention of “subversive” elements.

The Democrats’ deliberate sabotage of their own case in the second Trump impeachment was widely noted by legal observers. “If the House was going to impeach, it should have framed the case to make it as difficult as possible for the Senate to acquit,” wrote Michael W. McConnell, a constitutional professor at Harvard Law School.

“It is abundantly clear,” he noted, that Trump “sought to intimidate members of Congress and other officials to block Mr. Biden’s election, and that he failed in his duty to do what he could to end the violence once it started. Those would be ample grounds for conviction.”

But any investigation of the Republicans’ efforts to overturn the election and the stand-down of federal forces would have implicated precisely the forces the Democrats were most concerned with protecting.

Following the impeachment vote, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear the Democrats’ motivation for protecting Trump’s Republican co-conspirators. “We need a strong Republican Party,” Pelosi said, echoing an earlier declaration by Biden.

In choosing between the interests of the ruling elite and democratic forms of government, the Democrats will side with the needs of America’s plutocracy every time. The Democrats have proven once again that they have no interest in defending constitutional forms of government in the United States. The defense of democratic rights must and will be carried out through the independent mobilization of the working class on the basis of an anti-capitalist, socialist program.

Zooey wrote:

According to several reports, Republicans reportedly threatened to wield the filibuster against Biden’s cabinet nominees and legislative agenda if Democrats called witnesses in the impeachment trial. The reasoning goes that Biden and the Democrats want to get something accomplished, so they caved to the threat of the Republicans to immobilize the government.

That’s probably true, but I still don’t think that is the real reason the Democrats didn’t call witnesses. If they had called witnesses, they would have destroyed the GOP. The tendrils in this were not just between Trump and his mob. The tendrils also connected to about 10 people we know of for certain in Congress who were not just complicit, but collaborative in this attempted overthrow of the government. There were also tendrils into the Capitol police, and possibly the Pentagon and the National Guard. But we know for sure Congress and the police. The damage the GOP would have sustained from eyewitnesses and participants would have driven a fatal wedge between the Corporate/Business wing of the party and its fascist QAnon/MAGA populist wing. And that would have finished off the political power of the right. The consequence of that would have been that the the progressive wing of the Democrat party would have filled that power vacuum, and the Democrats prefer Republicans to the progressives. They’ve made that abundantly clear over the past decade. We have all seen that the Democrats punch left, and negotiate right. And destroying the Republican party would have inevitably led to all kinds of things: Green New Deal (a real one, too), Wall St reform, Medicare for All, increased wages and benefits for workers, stronger unions, less imperialism abroad, reduced police state, all kinds of things that the financiers of the Democrat party do not want to see happen. The Democrats NEED the Republicans so that THEY can be the leftward edge of the economic and political spectrums.

That’s my view as well, Zooey. Well said.

The Dems also need the GOP so they can play their “Not as bad as the Republicans” game. I don’t think it’s a winning strategy, but they seem convinced that it is. I think if they hadn’t gone that route, we never would have seen the rise of the new right in America. No Reagan, Bush, Tea Party or Trump. The Dems could have stopped all of that from even starting if they had stuck with FDR-style governance at least, updated to suit circumstances as they unfolded.

To short-cut all of this, if they had been the party of AOCs, from the 1960s on, the right never could have mustered a majority to push through Thatcherism, the Chicago School and so on from there. It’s really in the absence of proactive, progressive governance that the far-right can and often does take hold.

Capitalism atomizes society. Turns us into competing monads of flailing desires. Which means, without a strong public sector, actively trying to improve lives, far too many Americans feel left out, alone, on their own, and in eternal competition with their fellow Americans and the rest of the world. Capitalism creates a dog eat dog world on purpose, cuz it profits off of that. It won’t survive if we all wake up and work collectively to better our conditions and society.

The role of the two parties is to keep us separated, while gaslighting us into thinking we’re a part of something bigger.

I wonder how many Dems or Republicans, at the individual level, know this is happening, promote it, go along with it, or fight against it.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.

Billy_T wrote:

The role of the two parties is to keep us separated, while gaslighting us into thinking we’re a part of something bigger.

I wonder how many Dems or Republicans, at the individual level, know this is happening, promote it, go along with it, or fight against it.

I agree with all of that.

This last bit, though, reminded me of another thought that has been rolling around inside my head, and that is this: we just saw an attempted violent overthrow of a democratically-elected government, instigated by the defeated president of the United States, aided by members of the government at the highest levels.

That is just astonishing.

It should blow away even 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as the most shocking attack on this country in since the Civil War, if not of all American history.

And the country is DIVIDED on whether it was really such a bad thing or not.

AND…there is hardly a whimper of outrage from the public. Americans just really aren’t all that interested in it outside of the usual circle of people who follow politics for a hobby much the same way as we follow football. The entire country got upset at 9/11, and the Challenger disaster, and whatever, but this shit show got pretty low ratings, and America was – you know – flipping ahead in the book to see how many more pages were left. They wanted it to just be over somehow.

That right there is substantial cause for concern, imo. We just experienced a fascist coup attempt right before our eyes, right here in the US Capitol, and a few thousand Republicans dropped their party affiliation, and then we all tuned into WandaVision.

The people who supported the coup are all STILL THERE, the same place they were before the coup, and one failed coup attempt wiser in planning and coordination. And nobody seems to fucking care.

Zooey wrote:

And the country is DIVIDED on whether it was really such a bad thing or not.

AND…there is hardly a whimper of outrage from the public. Americans just really aren’t all that interested in it outside of the usual circle of people who follow politics for a hobby much the same way as we follow football. The entire country got upset at 9/11, and the Challenger disaster, and whatever, but this shit show got pretty low ratings, and America was – you know – flipping ahead in the book to see how many more pages were left. They wanted it to just be over somehow.

Doesn’t this contradict your theory about how the Dems avoided trying to destroy the Republican party with the impeachment trial?

The Republicans again and again object to Trump’s impeachment proceedings with the stupid arguments that the Trump impeachments will make impeachment a normal and common affair, instead of a last resort.

It’s a stupid argument because impeachment proceedings are suicide for a majority party unless there is outrage about a politicians’s behavior.

Republicans just ignore the importance of the political will of the country. And that’s partly why I don’t buy the theory about Dems ignoring witnesses to avoid destroying the Republican party.

The Dems realize that they are just barely beating the Republicans–there’s not a large margin of error here even with the terrible and incompetent government that Trump led the last 4 years.

Yes, it is depressing that 47% of American voters support someone like Trump, but how is that the Dems fault?

I don’t see conspiracy here–just a country filled with selfish people who hate taxes, religious people who could care less about the 1st Amendment, and racists.

Here is another view, from Heather Cox Richardson, an historian who has a sizable following on FB. It proposes a theory for why the Dems abandoned witnesses for pretty simple, practical reasons.

“…Trump’s lawyers proceeded in the impeachment trial with the same rhetorical technique Trump and his supporters use: they flat-out lied. Clearly, they were not trying to get at the truth but were instead trying to create sound bites for right-wing media, the same way Trump and the rest of his cabal convinced supporters of the big lie that he had won, rather than lost, the 2020 election. In that case, they lied consistently in front of the media, but could not make anything stick in a courtroom, where there are penalties for not telling the truth.

In the first impeachment hearings, Trump supporters did the same thing, shouting and lying to create sound bites, and while the sworn testimony was crystal clear, their antics left many Americans convinced not of the facts but that then-President Trump was being persecuted by Democrats who were trying to protect Hunter Biden. So, while it’s reasonable to imagine that witnesses would illustrate Trump’s depravity, it seems entirely likely that, as Trump’s lawyers continued simply to lie and their lies got spread through right-wing media as truth, Americans would have learned the opposite of what they should have.

Instead, the issue of Trump’s guilt on January 6 will play out in a courtroom, where there are actual rules about telling the truth. Trump’s own lawyers suggested he should answer for his actions in a court of law, and in a fiery speech after the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell set up the same idea. But even if that does not happen, the Capitol rioters will be in court, keeping in front of Americans both the horrific events of January 6 and their contention that they showed up to fight because their president asked them to.

The constant refrain of the January 6 insurrection mirrors the Republicans’ use of sham investigations to convince people that Democrats are criminals—think, for example, of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails—except, this time, the cases are real. This should address the problem of manufactured sound bites, and should benefit the Democrats with voters, especially as Republicans are now openly the Party of Trump.

McConnell tried to address the party’s capitulation immediately after the vote with a speech blaming Trump for the insurrection and saying that his own vote to acquit was because he does not think the Senate can try a former president. This is posturing, of course; McConnell made sure the Senate did not take up the House’s article of impeachment while Trump was still in office, and now says that, because it did not do so, it does not have jurisdiction.

McConnell is trying to have it both ways. He has made it clear he wants to free the Republican Party from its thralldom to Trump, and he needs to do so in order to regain both voters and the major donors who have distanced themselves from party members who support the big lie. But he needs to keep Trump voters in the party. So he has bowed to the Trump wing in the short term, hoping to retain its goodwill, and then, immediately after the vote, gave a speech condemning Trump to reassure donors that he and the party are still sane. He likely hopes that, as the months go by and the Republicans block President Biden’s plans, alienated voters and donors will come back around to the party. From this perspective, the seven Republican votes to convict Trump provide excellent cover.

It’s a cynical strategy and probably the best he can do, but it’s a long shot that it alone will enable the Republicans to regain control of the House and the Senate in 2022. For that, the Republicans need to get rid of Democratic votes….”