The U.S. Senate may have acquitted Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial today but North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman thinks the former president’s guilt is “undeniable.”
“This vote was not an absolution of Donald Trump,” Huffman said in a statement released to social media platforms shortly after the senate’s vote. “His crimes are undeniable. That will go down in history, along with the senators who betrayed their oath and refused to stand up to the man who incited a violent attack against all of us and our democracy.”
The Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump on the charge that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. While seven Republicans voted with the Senate’s 50 Democrats, the vote fell fall short of the two-thirds threshold needed to convict.
Huffman, a long and outspoken critic of Trump’s, joined a majority of his colleagues Jan. 13 in the 232-197 vote to charge Trump with incitement of insurrection, making him the first president to be impeached twice.
This article appears in ‘Kickback Scheme’.
Go down in history as the 2nd time in the last 4 years that we have done what our founding fathers warned us about. Party line impeachment votes. It was Alexander Hamilton that warned us that the “greatest danger” is that impeachment will “be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
Only in a country where people as awful as Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are considered relatively sane could the matter of Trump’s conviction have been anything but a forgone conclusion. We live in a nation where “far left” and “radical” applies to taking climate change seriously, wanting a more humane and efficient health care system and thinking cops probably shouldn’t murder people. Gasp! Forget about the wall to keep people from coming in; for the good of the world, put up a padded wall to keep us all contained.
Every time a Democrat or any thinking person appears on TV, they need to draw attention to the bad faith nature of right wing arguments (be they about trickle-down economics or climate change or gun control measures or immigration or voter fraud or what have you). Debating the substance of what Republicans claim lends their arguments undue credibility, normalizes absurdities and wastes precious time down one rabbit hole or another. Instead, Democrats and others should quickly – and quite literally – laugh off the arguments before hammering home the message that Republicans in power – with, perhaps, the exception of the genuinely crazy ones – don’t believe their own nonsense. Bluntly state that Republicans are using and abusing their supporters, that Republicans in power are fomenting and exploiting ignorance for personal gain (greater wealth and power). Plant seeds of doubt and disgust in the minds of those who vote Republican. If those seeds take root in the minds of just a fraction of Republican voters, that would be a significant step in the right direction.