Trump's second impeachment trial kicked off with House impeachment managers and Trump's counsel debating if the trial was constitutional.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spoke out on Monday night to rip into Democrats for their impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump.
While appearing on “Hannity” on Fox News, Graham complained about having to participate in the impeachment trial at all.
“I got to listen to this crap,” Graham said. “So, I hope by Sunday or Monday, the trial will be over. Here’s what I can tell you — if the House managers want to call one witness, the defense is going to call all the people you named and then some.”
“To my colleagues tomorrow, there are a hundred of us, what we do today is going to make history of the time America exists,” he added. “What Democrats have done is basically declared war on the presidency itself. The impeachment in House took place without a hearing, without one witness being called, and without a lawyer for the president of the United States.”
“You can’t get a traffic ticket based on the producers they used to impeach President Trump,” Graham continued. “And we’re also impeaching a man who’s out of office. When you combine a snap impeachment with an impeachment of a president who’s out of office, you’re going to destroy the presidency itself.”
“I know you hate Trump but please, pull back before we set in motion this destruction of the presidency by never-ending impeachments based on lack of due process and political retribution as the motive,” he said.
Not stopping there, Graham went on to argue that in impeaching a former president, the Democrat-controlled Congress was creating a new precedent.
“I think you’ll see statements by politicians that are more insightful than what President Trump said,” he predicted. “But when the Founders created impeachment for the president, it was different than for judges and anybody else. It requires that the chief justice of the United States to preside over presidential impeachments. Why? Because you don’t want a juror preceding over the impeachment of a presidential officeholder.”
“So the idea that the president is treated differently under the Constitution makes perfect sense,” Graham said. “They never envisioned going after the president once he’s out of office because the purpose for impeachment is to remove the person, not bar them from running in the future.”
“So, the whole point of impeachment is lost when the person is no longer in office,” Graham continued. “They didn’t go after Nixon when he resigned for a reason. So to my colleagues here, you’re about to set in motion a historical precedent that will put at risk every future president.”
“You could be impeached in the future based on hatred, 50 hours no witness, no hearing, no lawyer,” he concluded. “You can be impeached after you leave office. George Washington, under this theory, can be impeached for owning slaves. We’re doing a lot of damage to the country because people hate Trump. Knock it off.”
Related: Lindsey Graham Agrees With Obama That AOC Should Be Given Bigger Role In Democratic Party
This piece was written by James Samson on February 9, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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The post Lindsey Graham Rips Impeachment – ‘We’re Doing A Lot Of Damage To The Country Because People Hate Trump’ appeared first on The Political Insider.
The insurrectionists who ransacked the Capitol didn’t just terrorize lawmakers — they sent trusted aides, family members and beloved Capitol employees fleeing for their lives, frantically typing what might have been their final texts to loved ones while the mob battered down doors and brutalized police.
That’s the story House Democrats prosecuting former President Donald Trump want senators to remember when deciding whether to convict him for inciting the Jan. 6 riots. It’s a personal one. Every lawmaker was a victim. Some removed their congressional pins to avoid being spotted. Others fumbled with gas masks while listening to the House chaplain deliver a prayer. Others still helped barricade doors and comfort colleagues when an officer’s shot killed rioter Ashli Babbitt nearby.
It was an extraordinary subplot to Trump’s impeachment trial — the first for a former president — an acknowledgment that the lawmakers sitting in judgment of Trump were also the victims of the alleged crime and the most emotionally invested in the outcome. It was a trauma they shared together.
“Like every one of you, I was evacuated as this violent mob stormed the Capitol’s gates,” said Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), one of the House’s nine prosecutors in the Senate trial that began Tuesday. “What you experienced that day, what we experienced that day, what our country experienced that day, is the framer’s worst nightmare come to life.”
The goal was clear: help rekindle the dread, the fear that enveloped all of them for several hours last month, when fury at Trump for fomenting false claims about the stolen election, and his excusing of the rioters’ behavior, was at its peak.
So far, though, Republicans appeared unmoved.
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said the presentation was intended to "knock you off your feet," but added that GOP senators were looking for new information. “It was kind of a compilation of what we all [saw] on a tragic day,” Braun said.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) acknowledged that the impeachment was singular because “everybody here was also a witness and potentially a victim of what happened on that day.” But he said members had already processed that reality.
“I think we’ve had a lot of time to think over the last [four] weeks about what happened, why it happened, why it shouldn’t have happened, and more importantly, what role the president played in that regard or what role anybody played in that regard,” he said.
The GOP senators’ comments underscored that the Senate is unlikely to reach the two-thirds vote necessary to convict Trump. But Democrats view the emotional appeal as their best possible effort at persuasion.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the House’s lead prosecutor, told senators he was just a day removed from burying his 25-year-old son, and — still awash in grief — had brought his daughter to the Capitol, guaranteeing it would be safe despite Trump’s calls for supporters to descend on Washington. When it wasn’t, he feared his family was in danger yet again, and he said he was gutted when his daughter told him she didn’t want to return to the Capitol again.
“Of all the terrible, brutal things I heard and I saw that day and since then, that one hit me the hardest,” Raskin said. “That and watching someone use an American flagpole, the flag still on it to spear and pummel one of our police officers, ruthlessly, mercilessly, tortured by a pole with a flag on it that he was defending with his very life.”
Rep. David Cicilline put it more plainly: “They could have killed all of us.”
It was an argument that landed with enormous force in the Senate, especially after Democrats primed the members with a haunting montage of violence committed by those who breached the Capitol.
Republicans and Democrats alike said the House managers hit the mark in their arguments — even if Republicans arrived predetermined to acquit Trump on a technical constitutional argument advanced by Trump’s lawyers.
Trump’s team, led by Bruce Castor and David Schoen, appeared caught off-guard by how well the House team connected with senators. Castor acknowledged that they reshuffled their presentation — which they expected to be more technical — to rebut the House’s sweeping claims. But the result was a muddled argument that had senators murmuring and passing notes to each other and led one of Trump’s 2020 impeachment lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, to rip the defense as a disaster on cable TV.
Castor and Schoen spent their two hours attempting to siphon any emotion out of the day. Castor described the House’s rush to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection as a natural human urge to blame someone for a terrible tragedy. Schoen went further, calling it a response to the “insatiable lust for impeachment in the House for the past four years.”
He mounted an argument geared toward a Republican audience, claiming the “snap impeachment” was simply an outgrowth of Democrats’ “bloodlust” to punish Trump since he took office. Schoen played his own montage — set to a spooky soundtrack — of rank-and-file Democrats calling Trump’s ouster from 2017 through 2019. And he then turned to a more technical argument against the constitutionality of the trial, winning the support ultimately of 44 out of 50 GOP senators.
But Democrats made clear that they’re not going to shy away from forcing their Senate colleagues to relive the episode that continues to haunt many of them.
“This is personal for them,” a top aide to the House managers said. “They experienced the attack. Their staff experienced the attack … They know you as reporters that day got attacked. They saw what happened to the officers.”
“The managers are trying this case to move the hearts, minds and consciousness of all hundred jurors.