In a piece at Project Syndicate Eric Posner echoes points I’ve been making around here for the last month and a half:
Republican senators must weigh the risk of losing votes to challengers in party primaries if they vote to convict Trump against the risk of losing the support of moderates in the general election if they vote to acquit him. Because most conservative states will send Republicans to the Senate, most Republican senators will be warier of primary challenges and vote against conviction.
In fact, those senators would rather not vote at all – and not be tarnished in the general election – which is why all but six Republicans preferred to vote that the Senate lacks jurisdiction to try Trump. But Democrats may have done them a favor by overreaching in another respect: by alleging in the single article of impeachment that Trump incited an insurrection.
In both ordinary language and legal terms, an insurrection is an uprising against the government. The House managers argue that Trump incited a mob to overthrow the government. In a technical sense, we might call the mob action an insurrection, even though at the time Trump was the head of the government that he supposedly sought to overthrow.
At least some members of the mob hoped to kill, abduct, or intimidate members of Congress and (somehow) prevent Congress from certifying the election. The argument is that Trump not only sparked the mob’s march on the Capitol, but also anticipated such a result and deliberately brought it about. Then, once the violence began, he did too little to stop it.
Maybe. But the better reading of events is that Trump was being Trump. By the standards of previous American presidents and virtually all American politicians, he was extraordinarily reckless in insisting for two months that the election was stolen and then in using inflammatory language with the crowd that had gathered to protest the election results.
But he did not directly ask the crowd to engage in violence, and there is no evidence that he anticipated that they would. Trump, like everyone else, must have expected that the police would keep the crowd under control, and would not have expected them to invade the Capitol (something that has not happened since the War of 1812, when British troops occupied Washington).
concluding:
The real reason to disqualify Trump is that he is a menace to American institutions whose reckless, power-mad antics almost undermined an election and will sow mischief for years to come. This should be plainly said.
As I’ve also said by dwelling on disqualification and forcing Republican senators to suffer consequences rather than focusing on conviction on the single charge, they’re actually undermining their own case. At this point they’re just wasting valuable time. They should have voted to censure on January 7, enacted laws that would prevent similar situations in the future, and left it at that.
