Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he was defending the U.S. Constitution, not Donald Trump, by voting to absolve the former president of the impeachment charge of inciting an insurrection.
McConnell, R-Ky., In an article for the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday called the January 6 Capitol rebellion a “shameful day”, but argued that Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution prohibits senators from impeachment of former employees.
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“There is no doubt that ex-President Trump has moral responsibility,” wrote McConnell, saying that his supporters invaded the Capitol because of the “unbalanced falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone.”
McConnell called Trump’s behavior during and after the riot “unscrupulous” and said he was “as indignant as any member of Congress”.
“But senators take our own oaths. Our job was not to find a way, in any way, to inflict punishment,” he wrote. “The Senate’s first and fundamental duty was to protect the Constitution.”
Trump was the first president in U.S. history to face two charges of impeachment, and the first out-of-office president to go through an impeachment process.
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“The House’s ‘only power of impeachment’ and the ‘Senate’s only power to try all impeachments’ would constitute an unlimited circular logic with no stopping point for former officers,” he continued. “Any ordinary citizen could be disqualified. That is why a House manager had to argue that the Senate has ‘absolute and unqualified’ jurisdiction. But nobody really accepts that.”
In this video image, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., Speaks after the Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump in his second Senate impeachment trial at the US Capitol in Washington, Saturday, 13 February 2021. (Senate Television via AP)
((Senate Television via AP))
McConnell said his position aligns with “the first constitutional scholar Justice Joseph Story”, who noted that “although disqualification is optional, removal is mandatory on conviction”.
“The Constitution presupposes that anyone convicted by the Senate must have a position from which he can be removed,” McConnell explained. “This does not mean that leaving office offers immunity from liability. Former employees “can still be tried and punished in ordinary courts of law”. Criminal law and civil litigation ensure that there is no so-called January exemption. “
Fox News reported last week that there is a criminal investigation in Georgia to see if Trump broke any laws with his call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to hand over the state to Trump.
McConnell has changed, saying that there is a “modern reflex to demand total satisfaction in each news cycle”.
“But impeachment is not a final moral court. It is a specific tool with a narrow purpose: to restrict government officials, ”he explained. “The moment Donald Trump was no longer president, he left the Senate’s jurisdiction.”
McConnell said he respects his Senate colleagues who voted to condemn, recognizing that the text is not “clear”.
Democrats blamed McConnell for not bringing the Senate back to the session to consider the impeachment article that passed the House on January 13, a week before Trump stepped down.
McConnell countered that “no remotely fair or regular Senate process could have started and ended in less than a week,” saying that “even the quick impeachment process we just completed took 19 days”.
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Rushing the Senate back to the session would have “fragmented due process and triggered a constitutional crisis in a race to prevent our loss of jurisdiction,” he wrote.
“This selective disregard for rules and regulations is a civic disease that is spreading across the political left,” he said.