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Dread and anxiety

Presiding officer, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, swears in members of the Senate for the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, Jan. 16, 2020. (Screen capture: Senate Television/AP)

Chris Hayes Monday night framed the Trump Insurrection of Jan. 6 in a clarifying way, as an assassination attempt on democracy. House managers earlier had delivered to the U.S. Senate an article of impeachment against Donald J. Trump for inciting insurrection against government he was sworn to defend. The ex-president wanted his name emblazoned in history. He succeeded in ignominy.

A sitting president incited an assault on the Capitol itself. With a violent mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” (Trump’s vice president) and searching for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a serious threat existed that insurrectionists meant to murder the next two people in line for the presidency as well as other lawmakers. For him. For Trump.

“The first impeachment of Donald Trump was an act of self-preservation by Democrats. The second is an act of self-preservation by Congress,” Adam Serwer writes at The Atlantic.

The reason to convict Trump and bar him from office forever is rather simple: No sitting president has ever incited a violent attack on Congress. Allowing Trump to do so without sanction would invite a future president with autocratic ambitions and greater competence to execute a successful overthrow of the federal government, rather than the soft echo of post-Reconstruction violence the nation endured in early January. The political incentives for the Republican Party in convicting Trump may be unclear, but the stakes for democracy are not. The Senate must make clear that attempted coups, no matter how clumsy or ineffective, are the type of crime that is answered with swift and permanent exile from American political life.

Reaching the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict has never happened in three previous presidential impeachments. Andrew Johnson escaped removal from office by a single vote, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (in his first impeachment) by a much wider margin. Whether the threat to their lives on Jan. 6 put enough of the of God in Republican senators to join Democrats in convicting Trump in his second trial time will determine.

The costs for Republicans would be high, Serwer notes. Arizona Republicans censured Sen. John McCain’s widow, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey over the weekend.  In Oregon, the Republicans’ state executive committee in a resolution declared the insurrection a “false flag” operation “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans.” Republicans in the Senate will consider not only their political futures and their own safety but must choose between their allegiance to their party and to the republic.

Serwer summarized their strategy for avoiding holding Trump accountable for his actions:

To avoid a difficult choice, some Senate Republicans have coalesced around the cowardly and nonsensical argument that ex-presidents cannot be tried by the Senate. But neither the text of the Constitution nor the intent of the Framers can justify, say, a president ordering a drone strike on the Supreme Court and then resigning and retiring to private life without consequence. Or imagine a president ordering a politically aligned militia to assemble outside Congress in order to compel the opposition party to pass a law he favors, without explicitly ordering an attack. An acquittal would represent an invitation to a future president to use force to bend Congress to his will.

The Capitol riot was a tragic farce, but the type of political violence it represents poses an existential threat to democracy. Congress now faces a question not just of self-preservation, but of deterrence. Parties change over time. Although today it is the Republican Party that is struggling with a faction that does not accept the legitimacy of its political opponents, a century and a half ago that description applied to the Democratic Party. Any president from any party who incites a violent attack on another branch of government in order to seize power should be forever barred from holding office.

Republicans national and state were eager supplicants throughout Trump’s four years. They give no indication of having regrown spines or a deepened commitment to the republic. They acquitted him for using his office to turn a foreign government into a tool in his reeleection. They stood by, maskless accomplices in COVID-19 denial, as 400,000 Americans died under Trump’s misadministration of what should have been a coordinated, national response to the global pandemic. Their response to the Trump-incited attempt to assassinate American democracy inspires no confidence they have sobered from drinking MAGA kool-aid. Whether a significant portion of citizens and a major political party are Americans now in name only remains an open question. One the coming Senate trial is unlikely to resolve.

Hayes’s “ambient sense of dread and anxiety” is justified.

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