If Biden Really Wants ‘Unity,’ He Will Call Off Kangaroo Court Impeachment Trial
Peter Parisi /
In his inauguration speech Jan. 20, President Joe Biden invoked Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address—and a nation, now as then, deeply divided.
“To overcome these challenges—to restore the soul and to secure the future of America—requires more than words,” Biden solemnly intoned. “It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: unity. Unity.”
The repetition presumably was for emphasis.
“Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation,” Biden said, using the words “unity” or “uniting” 11 times in his 22-minute address.
If Biden genuinely desired to be a bipartisan, unifying figure in a politically riven nation, he would call on his fellow Democrats—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.—to call off next week’s divisive and futile second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
One can scarcely imagine anything more bitterly divisive than a highly partisan trial in a Senate evenly split 50-50 between the two parties in an impeachment trial that is prima facie unconstitutional to begin with.
The Senate trial, set to begin Feb. 9, at its core is liberal blood sport, despite the fact that 10 Republicans in the House voted for impeachment and five in the Senate don’t think it’s unconstitutional.
“I think it has to happen,” Biden said, referring to the Senate trial, on Jan. 25, a scant five days after appealing—apparently insincerely—for national unity.
He did so even while acknowledging there’s zero chance that the requisite 17 Republican senators would join the Senate Democratic lynch mob to reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump.
The liberal pundits on CNN and MSNBC, in The Washington Post, and elsewhere might want instead to mull over why not a single Senate Democrat appears to have any qualms about proceeding with this patently unconstitutional star chamber.
If there were any doubts as to the trial’s unconstitutionality, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts dispelled them when it was announced, albeit without explanation, that he wouldn’t preside over it.
And if there were any doubts as to the Stalinist show trial character of the proceedings, look no further than at who will preside in the chief justice’s stead: Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a hyperpartisan who voted to convict Trump in Trump’s first failed impeachment trial a year ago this week on Feb. 5, 2020.
Yet, Leahy now implausibly promises to adhere to his “constitutional and sworn obligations to administer the trial with fairness.”
In short, the only thing that will be missing in next week’s Senate kangaroo court impeachment trial will be the kangaroo, and Senate Republicans should treat it accordingly.
For guidance, they could turn to no less an authority than the late leftist icon Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense,” the fifth of Alinsky’s 13 “rules for radicals” states. “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
Rather than treat the impeachment trial somberly and with a seriousness it does not deserve, Senate Republicans should treat it as the sham that it is—or, as Alinsky would have advised, with ridicule.
“I pledge this to you,” Biden promised in his inaugural address, “I will be a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.”
If he really means that, the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump are waiting for Biden to call off the kangaroo court impeachment trial. That would be an easy down payment on his promise.
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