Slate "The Mob Is Still Occupying the Capitol. The GOP Acquits its President" [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

BY TOM SCOCCA
FEB 13, 20218:27 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/trump-acquittal-mob-still-at-capitol.html

Of all the footage that played in the video-intensive impeachment of the screen-addicted president, the clip that truly mattered was the one in which a group of rioters, ransacking the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, finds a document in Sen. Ted Cruz’s desk about his objection to the electoral college certification. At first they are furious, until one of them explains that the objection means that, like them, Cruz is fighting against the election result. “He’s with us, he’s with us,” this one rioter tells the other rioters.

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The managers had to pretend Cruz and McConnell and the other Republicans were not complicit in Trump’s abuses, because their goal was to get 17 Republican senators to join the Democrats in convicting him. At trial’s end, only seven of the 50 members of the minority conference took the managers up on it. The rest of the Republicans didn’t care what rhetorical gestures the impeachment managers had made toward separating them from their president, for the sake of granting them independence from the president and his mob. They chose to stay bound to him. They are the mob.

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So led by Mitch McConnell—who said afterward that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack—the Republicans chose to pretend that they had no power to do anything. Rubio, who’d called the violence around Trump rallies “frightening, grotesque, and disturbing” during the 2016 primary campaign, cast the 34th vote to acquit, sealing the result. In regretful tones, when it was over, McConnell repeated the same message he’d issued in a statement in the morning, preempting the closing arguments, that he read the constitution to mean that impeachment could only apply to current officeholders.

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Yet again—one more time, if not one last time—the Trump presidency had demonstrated that the United States Constitution is a failure. Its fundamental mechanisms do not work. A president may not be investigated, if he refuses a congressional subpoena. A president may take bribes and misappropriate funds, if he does it all in the open. Five dead bodies and a Congress put to flight are not enough to convict and disqualify a president from seeking power again, if that president’s party wants to protect him.

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If any doubt had been left, the Senate established what we are, or what this government is. Donald Trump is still in command of one major political party and free to run for president again, in hopes that the next election might be closer, or that his next mob might bring more guns. Immediately after the trial ended, the Louisiana Republican Party voted to censure Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had been one of the seven Republicans to find Trump guilty. To oppose the coup was to oppose the party