The impeachment managers have presented a fine prosecutorial case, with video, audio, and textual evidence, along with inescapably logical argumentation and personal entreaties. Their approach could have been sufficient, perhaps overwhelming, for an ordinary jury to hear. They did their job admirably, according to conventionally-defined process.
But this is no ordinary jury,* not when more than a few of the jurors enabled or contributed to a very real attempt to stop the electoral vote certification, kill members of Congress and the vice president, overthrow the lawful government of the United States of America, and install a white supremacist dictatorship. Democrats’ polite appeals to reason and responsibility may earn approbations for style from the like-minded and from the corporate press, but they will not appease enough Republican senators, not those who’ve thrown in fully with fascism.
For a chance at justice as a country, we need to have it out. We need impeachment managers unspooling every significant strand of the plot out onto the Senate floor, Republican senators’ treachery and white sumpremacism explicit among it. We need Democratic senators and representatives righteously moving to expel their insurrectionist Republican colleagues (more members than just Rep. Cori Bush and the few with her moral clarity). We need the mass media gravitational pull that impeachment trial witnesses would bring. We need to see enraged Republican senators attempting wild procedural moves and flipping chairs. There can be no real progress without angering the complicit nor without unsettling those in D.C. and across the country who sat silent while evil nearly prevailed. The same confrontation-averse line of Democratic thinking that helped leave the political landscape vulnerable to Republican fascists won’t get us out of danger. We need our representatives to make clear the malice in Republicans’ intent, their proto-genocidal drive to uphold and expand white (male, Christian, straight) dominance and to impose the submission of all others.
Especially with too many Republican senators out of reach, we need Democratic leaders to openly appeal to the court of public opinion. (It shouldn’t be that what’s forthrightly advantageous for Democrats is somehow triple-overthought into a supposed political pitfall.) With instead a raw and confrontational witnesses’ accounting of the insurrection at the Capitol, and after the ensuing righteous public outrage, by some slightly increased chance enough Republican senators may well succumb to pressure to convict. But regardless of the prospects of conviction, more essential is the increased public awareness of the nationally existential danger of white supremacist fascism, the importance of the matter to everyone’s personal lives, and the urgency for more of them to speak out, act, and vote for democracy and justice.
Please call your congressperson’s and senators’ DC offices and demand that they call witnesses before the impeachment trial. They can influence Speaker Pelosi and impeachment managers Raskin, DeGette, Cicilline, Castro, Swalwell, Lieu, Plaskett, Dean, and Neguse to decide to call witnesses. In all likelihood, today before close of business Eastern time is the last chance for you to do so.
Government Watchdogs Call For Witness Testimony In Trump Impeachment Trial Free Speech for People, February 8, 2021 In a letter to Senators Patrick Leahy and Chuck Schumer and Representative Jamie Raskin, a coalition of public interest organizations urges Democrats to include witnesses of the events of January 6th to strengthen the case for convicting President Trump.
[...] The witnesses proposed in the letter include Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; Members of Congress, their aides, and Capitol staff targeted during the January 6th riot; Capitol police officers attacked by the rioters; and President Trump himself by way of subpoena. [...]
Signed: Free Speech For People, Equal Justice Society, Mainers for Accountable Leadership, March for Truth, Progressive Democrats of America, Revolving Door Project
History Demands Witnesses: Tell Democrats to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump MoveOn campaign created by Justin Hendrix
We must call witnesses in the impeachment trial before moving to a vote on whether to convict, such as:
- White House aides with the President on and around the date of January 6th
- People in the chain of command to the DC National Guard
- Senators and House members who played a role in the President's disinformation campaign
- Participants in the riot such as leaders of the Proud Boys and others who have claimed they were there on Trump's behalf
- Organizers of the rally and prior Stop the Steal rallies
* Or perhaps it’s all to ordinary of an American jury, like the grand jury that just declined to charge police who severely injured a lone elderly Black Lives Matter protestor.
We need Democratic congresspeople to not, through truths unspoken, manufacture the false possibility of nonexistent Republican good intentions. We need for them to not, through avenues of action and persuasion unused, destroy the political meaning of our efforts and desires. We need for them to make Republicans pay the full political price for what they’ve done and for what they stand for. Politics ain’t bean bag. The professionalism of the impeachment managers’ presentation papers over the knowing inadequacy of their strategy.
Remember how after the Ukraine impeachment acquittal several prominent Democrats promised that investigations would continue, given new information that surfaced during the trial? The hints of subpoenaing Bolton, et cetera? Dissipated away with the passing of the moment. (We never even found out who associated with the Trump administration plotted to kill former ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovich, thus forcing her ouster.)
Rushing through an acquittal may seem the wiser part of the bargain for freeing up national attention for pandemic rescue, voting rights, and the rest. But we will not have another chance to make our gnarled democratic institutions reach toward their theoretical promise quite the same way anytime soon. Trump and company may they may face state prosecutions, or they may even face federal prosecutions (doubtful, especially if “nothing will fundamentally change”), but unless by some miracle congressional Democrats rediscover their inner Church and Pike commissions spirit, it won’t be the body of government closest to the people—the legislative branch—wholly fulfilling their oaths of office to save the country, it’ll be somebody else. It’ll be some supposed high authority, with pieces of legitimacy picked up among a diminished national moral authority, because those with the actual highest responsibility laid it down.
If we do somehow manage to convince the body of national government closest to the people, the legislative branch, to wield their legitimate authorities assertively on the public’s behalf, if that kind of political leadership fostered reckonings with truth and justice across the land, it could well lead to the reconstruction of America as a multiethnic, multicultural democracy.