In most trials, the high point is the jury deliberations and the vote on guilt or innocence. Unfortunately, the trial of Donald Trump will not be like other trials. There is little evidence that Trump will be convicted, and that is at least in part due to the fact there was no evidence presented by witnesses in the trial at all.

Tough to convict when no one sits there and points the finger: “He did it, I saw it!”

The senators are doing their jury deliberations today, in public, making their own impassioned arguments, ten minutes at a time. You do not see much coverage of those arguments – or any – because there is no expectation that any senator will cross party lines and say anything unexpected, nay anything that hasn’t been said already, during the deliberations.

The vote is scheduled to take place at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow Eastern Time, and will likely be a “Guilty” or “Innocent” voice vote – though I cannot confirm as such because the actual procedures are not set out beforehand, and are created as they go – see the vote to not call witnesses which happened last Friday.

If this were a real trial with real people, pulled from the streets surrounding the capitol, it would be compelling television. It is not a real trial.

It takes 67 votes to convict a president or anyone else in an impeachment trial. For our purposes, the process requires 20 Republicans to quickly find their sense of impartial justice or the world moves on, cringing in fear of how Donald Trump will react to his newfound power over the entire Republican party. No president in history will have ever held a greater degree of raw power. Trump got caught bribing a foreign power, with our money, attempting to fix the 2020 election.

It is “not good” but it is not impeachable, according to the Republicans.

Here are some Republican conclusions made today during the deliberations:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas

Cruz said he hoped the Senate would vote in “a bipartisan way to reject these articles of impeachment, to acquit the president, and to find President Trump not guilty of the articles the House has sent over.”

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

Rounds said the history of impeachment, based on what the nation’s founders intended, did not include “maladministration” as an impeachable offense, which is what he said the House managers had alleged against Trump.

“The framers actually discussed abuse of power and rejected it,” he said.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.

“Anyone who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog does not take this charge seriously,” he said. “Executive privilege and testimonial immunity are well established, constitutionally based presidential and executive branch privileges that every president at one time or another has asserted.”

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.,

Said the House managers prosecuting Trump failed to prove a case matching the “high bar” set by the nation’s founders to remove a president from office.

“Removing the president from office – and from the ballots for the upcoming election – would almost certainly plunge the country into even greater political turmoil,” he said.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.,

Said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was a “prophet” for predicting during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment that the bar for impeachment had been lowered so much that, “we have broken the seal on this extreme penalty.”

 

As we predicted quite a while ago, Trump’s defense went from “total hoax” and the “perfect call,” to the cries about unfair procedure,” over to the “lack of direct evidence,” which Republicans quickly abandoned once John Bolton became a direct witness prepared to testify, and we have finally ended where we knew we would end, with Republicans wailing that the House managers didn’t reach the “high bar” of impeachment.

In other words, they know Trump did something very wrong, but just cannot bring themselves to do anything about it.

That is terrifying.

It is sad that in such a desperate moment, such an important moment, one with ramifications that will ripple through a generation, there isn’t much more to be said.

The only way to get rid of Donald Trump is a near uprising of the population. Fortunately, we might be on the verge of one.

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Peace, y’all

jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom