With the second impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Congress is set for one of the most bizarre moments in constitutional history: the removal of someone who has already left office. The retroactive removal would be a testament to the timeliness of rage. While it is not without precedent, it is without logic.
The planned impeachment trial of Donald Trump after he leaves office would be our own version of the Cadaver Synod. In 897, Pope Stephen VI and his supporters continued to seethe over the action of Pope Formosus, who not only died in 896 but was followed by another pope, Boniface VI. After the brief rule of Boniface VI, Pope Stephen set about to even some scores. He pulled Formosus out of his tomb, propped him up in court, and convicted him of variety of violations of canon law. Formosus was then taken out, three fingers cut off, and eventually thrown in the Tiber River.
While some may be looking longingly at the Potomac for their own Cadaver Synod, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have stated that their primary interest is in the possible disqualification of Trump from holding future federal office. Disqualification however is an optional penalty that follows a conviction and removal. It may be added to the primary purpose of removal referenced in the Constitution. The Trump trial would convert this supplemental punishment into the primary purpose of the trial.
This did happen before but that precedent is only slightly better than the Cadaver Synod. That case involved William Belknap who served as Secretary of War to President Ulysses S. Grant. Belknap resigned after allegations of corruption — just shortly before a House vote of impeachment. The Senate held a trial but acquitted him. Twenty nine of 66 voting senators disagreed in a threshold motion that Belknap was “amenable to trial by impeachment . . . notwithstanding his resignation.” --->READ THE REST from JONATHAN TURLEY HERE
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| Ben Garrison at Grrraphics.com |
Trump not only defeated the establishment in 2016. He got 74 million votes for a second term. Then, he defiantly refused to recognize that his defeat was fairly accomplished. Trump is hated because he will not play the role the left has assigned to him in its historic morality play, in which the left is always the triumphant star.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
So alleged Liz Cheney, third-ranking Republican in the House, as she led nine GOP colleagues to vote for a second impeachment of Donald Trump. The House Republican caucus voted 19-1 against impeachment.
House Democrats voted lockstep, 222-0, to impeach in an exercise the solidarity of which calls to mind the Supreme Soviet of Stalin’s time.
But is what Cheney said true?
Undeniably, the huge crowd that assembled on the mall Wednesday did so at Trump’s behest. But that peaceful crowd was not the violent mob that invaded the Capitol.
The mob was a mile away as Trump spoke. It was up at the Capitol while Trump was on the Monument grounds. It could not hear him. And the break-in of the Capitol began even before Trump concluded his remarks. It was done as he spoke. Nor is there anything in the text of those remarks to indicate that Trump was signaling for an invasion of the Capitol.
How then did he light “the flame of this attack”? --->READ THE REST from PAT BUCHANAN HERE
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