Tag: impeachment trial

Land of the Free & Home of the Cowards: The Impeachment Trial

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I just finished watching day 2 of the question and answer portion of the impeachment trial. I don’t even know what to say. I haven’t even titled this post yet because the things I heard in the trial are still whirling in my head and I’m lowkey speechless.

I could talk about a lot of different things but I think I’ll talk about what an international embarrassment this whole situation is. Imagine: a country elects a new president who has a firm anti-corruption stance and proves it shortly after beginning his job by getting rid of corrupt government officials and the leader of The United States of America is now on trial for his own corruption.

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Not only that, the attorneys that are supposed to be defending the POTUS have jumped from one defense to another almost by the minute. A group of between 5-6 attorneys can’t even come up with a steady, consistent, and logical defense of what their client did.

The pièce de résistance on this mountain of disgrace is that we have a body, the Senate, full of lawyers, who have largely decided that this TRIAL doesn’t need documents or witnesses. Further, 8 minutes ago, a senator who is retiring (meaning there’s no need for political gameplay from him), and who at one point basically said he had no doubt that the POTUS did what he’s being accused of, just announced that he would vote against the entry of documents and witnesses. He just said that the House Managers proved their case and that what the POTUS did was inappropriate. By the way, that senator’s name is Lamar Alexander.

As an African-American, I was long disabused of the “greatest country” bullshit that Americans like to run around proclaiming. So, please don’t interpret my tone as one of disappointment. What I’m feeling is more like fatigue. The electoral college put a reality TV star into the White House. He majorly fucks up like anybody with sense knew he would. And because he apparently has some dirt on a few of his fellow Republicans, people who could not stand him back in 2016 (like Lindsay Graham), are suddenly beholden to him and too afraid to do the right thing.

If the senate doesn’t at least censure him, the United States would have lost whatever credibility it had left.

 

Impeachment The Wayward Daughter Way

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If you’re anything like me, you’ve been watching the ongoing saga that is the impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump. I watch it on my Firestick using the NBC app because I find the commentary from Ari Melber, Chris Hayes, and Rachel Maddow, and their accompanying panels to be the best and shadiest in the land.

Today, is the first day that the president’s counsel gets to present their defense. If you were expecting a random, largely untrue, nonsensical, so ironic it’s funny defense, you will not be disappointed.

But, that’s not what I want to talk about today. If you’ve tuned in from the beginning, you know that the GOP is closing ranks around not allowing documents and witnesses to be presented during the trial. This is stupid because what trial is ever successfully executed without documents and witnesses? Even Judge Judy requires paperwork.

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In my mind, I feel like the impeachment process needs to be changed to accommodate the ever-increasing partisanship and lack of principle of these politicians. So, here’s my proposal:

The jury in the impeachment trial needs to be the citizens. American citizens are called upon every day to sit on juries across the country. Most of these people have no legal or criminal justice background but they are entrusted by a judge, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and defendants to decide the fate of cases that range from small misdemeanors to 3rd degree felonies.

There is no reason that when the leader of the country is taken to trial, American citizens, who are most directly affected by bad political behavior, shouldn’t get to directly participate in deciding his/her fate.

I believe that the same process should be undertaken to choose a jury. Have voire dire and eliminate until the judge, lawyers, and defendant are comfortable with the final selection. Start the trial and may the odds be ever in the sitting POTUS’s favor.

The reason I feel this way, as I said before, is that politicians are now so unprincipled and corrupt themselves that they can’t really be trusted to do the right thing. I am not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. During the Obama era, I found the Republicans to be so infected with racism that they were willing to hurt their own constituents to stick it to the n*gger in the Oval Office. Now, I find the Republicans to be such cowards that they are willing to make themselves look like utter fools by saying that a trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors” doesn’t need documents and witnesses.

Not only does this demonstrate that they are unprofessional, but it shows that they are likely as unscrupulous as the POTUS most of them didn’t even like yet keep trying to defend for no reason at all.

I’m not an expert but I think we are getting more and more to a place where a group of people whose income is supplemented by lobbyist dollars and doing backroom deals, can hardly be trusted to make (legislative), enforce (executive), or interpret (judicial) the laws and policies that affect this country’s citizens.