Today is expected to mark the first day of former president Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and by all accounts, it’s looking to be an unusually short one.
As Politico reported , Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell recently agreed on the structure of the trial that will begin with a four-hour debate on the constitutionality of impeaching a former president and allow both Trump’s representatives and the House impeachment managers 16 hours to present their respective cases. This is expected to take place over the course of two days beginning on February 10.
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While it’s always hard to predict how long such matters could take, it’s possible that the Senate will come to a vote as early as the beginning of next week.
But it seems that Trump’s lawyers want it over with even sooner than that. Namely, because they don’t want the trial to happen at all.
On February 8, Trump’s attorneys filed a 78-page brief calling for the immediate dismissal of the House’s article of impeachment.
Although The Hill reported that the brief contains multiple typos and suggests that the article of impeachment constitutes political theater, it mainly argues that the case against Trump is “unconstitutional for a variety of reasons, any of which alone would be grounds for immediate dismissal.”
One of the main foundations for this claim is their assertion that it is unconstitutional to impeach a president after they leave office.
They also argued that Trump’s speech prior to the Capitol riot did not incite any violence and was protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Their argument in this area is twofold. According to The Hill, it’s partially based on the assertion that the riot was planned prior to the speech and that those involved acted purely of their own accord.
The other portion of this argument concerns the speech itself and claims, “Of the over 10,000 words spoken, Mr. Trump used the word ‘fight’ a little more than a handful of times and each time in the figurative sense that has long been accepted in public discourse when urging people to stand and use their voices to be heard on matters important to them; it was not and could not be construed to encourage acts of violence.”
In response, House Democrats stated that every allegation in the article of impeachment is true and that this defense of Trump’s speech is meritless.
Their response also addressed the constitutionality of trying a former president with the following statement: “Presidents swear a sacred oath that binds them from their first day in office through their very last. There is no ‘January Exception’ to the Constitution that allows Presidents to abuse power in their final days without accountability.”
Although Trump will be the first president to face an impeachment trial after his term has ended, it’s not unprecented for this to happen to U.S. officials.
According to NBC News , when Secretary of War William Belknap faced his own articles of impeachment over corruption charges in 1876, he personally brought his resignation to then-President Ulysses S. Grant in tears.
Nonetheless, both impeachment and the Senate trial proceeded anyway and a vote determining Belknap’s eligibility for impeachment carried in the Senate by a 37-29 margin.
At the time, House impeachment managers argued that if such action wasn’t taken, anyone who holds office could simply resign as soon as they were caught committing an impeachable offense and face no consequences.
However, anyone looking to Belknap’s case for hope in achieving a Trump conviction would do well to temper their expectations.
Because while the Senate upheld the decision to proceed with Belknap’s impeachment, they didn’t actually manage to secure the two-thirds vote needed to convict him.
This was because enough senators believed that the senate lacked jurisdiction to impeach someone who no longer held office and otherwise felt it was pointless to do so.
Considering that all but five Republican senators indicated a similar position in a recent vote , that hardly bodes well for those seeking a Trump conviction.
