Trump, post-impeachment

The Senate has spoken, and President Donald Trump was acquitted on Feb. 5, by a majority vote -- far short of the two-thirds majority required to remove him from office -- of the impeachment charges leveled by the House of Representatives. As anticipated by the Framers of our Constitution's "Republican Form of government" (U.S. Const. Art IV, section 4), Trump's "defence" was "commensurate with the ... attack." ("The Federalist," No.51 (James Madison) (Jacob E. Cooke, ed. 1961) at p. 349. See "The Federalist" No. 10 (James Madison), at p.59 ("[T]he principal task of modern Legislation involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operation of Government."); Id. at p. 60 ("Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm"); Id. No. 51 (James Madison) at p. 349 ("But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachment from the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate with the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.").

And now the media is reporting that the president's popularity with voters has increased, perhaps validating the prediction made in Jon Meacham, et al., "Impeachment, An American History" (Modern Library 2018) that:

"It is hard to imagine [President Trump being convicted in the Senate] absent some tectonic shift in our current political universe, not because senators lack conviction or devotion to democratic ideals, but rather because they answer to a higher authority: voters. Morality derives from a group's consensus of right and wrong, and nowhere more than in politics. Determinations of right and wrong require evaluation of circumstances, motive, and result. Given that we live in a tribal political environment unable to agree on basic facts, we are unlikely to generate the widespread moral outrage necessary to prompt senators to risk eviction by voting against their constituents or against their party. Id. at pp. 222-23." See also Jon Meacham, "American Lion" (Random House Paperback Ed. 2009) at pp. 188-89 (President Andrew Jackson was not impeached after U.S. Senator Henry Clay, who had also been Speaker of the House and Secretary of State, wrote that, if impeached, he was too popular to be convicted in the Senate.)

Columnist David Brooks published in the New York Times on Oct. 3, 2019, an imaginary conversation between an "Urban Guy" and "Flyover Man." It begins with Urban Guy's frustration with Flyover Man's unwillingness to support Trump's impeachment, and Flyover Man's responding:

"I haven't really had time to look into it. There's always some fight between Trump and the East Coast media. I guess I just try to stay focused on the big picture.

"The big picture is this: We knew this guy was a snake when we signed up. But he was the only one who saw us. He was the only one who saw that the America we love is being transformed in front of our eyes. Good jobs for hard working people were gone. Our communities in tatters. Our kids in trouble. I had one shot at change, so I made a deal with the devil, and you'd have made it too.

"Nothing in this impeachment mess makes me rethink this bargain. If people like you are unable to acknowledge my dignity and see my problems, I'll stay with Trump." See also Meacham, "Impeachment" at p. 40 ( "So long as a president is, as his oath of office demands, performing 'to the best of his abilities,' voters should be his ultimate judge.... .")

After the Senate's vote, Brooks published another New York Times column (Feb. 7, 2020) titled "How Trump Wins Again," in which he notes Trump's increasing popularity, the Democrat's self-defeating anti-capitalism campaign rhetoric, and that the president's State of the Union speech was "the most effective speech of the Trump presidency."

Maybe more voters now get it; that Trump shouldn't have been impeached in the first place, and that if the House majority's flawed impeachment proceedings had resulted in a conviction in the Senate so close to this year's election, it would not only have effectively nullified the 2016 election, but could also have prevented Trump from running for reelection? U. S. Const. Art. I, sec. 3 ("Judgment in case of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: ...")

How would such a result have squared with the apparently accepted-in-Washington argument that former Vice President Joe Biden is exempt from having his dealings with Ukraine while in office looked into, because he's running for president? 

Some of the above appeared in an article he wrote that was published in the Oct. 7, 2019, Daily Journal.