Brane Space: Should Trump Be Held Accountable For Fomenting Terror Strike On Capitol? Yes

"I was more terrified in this assault, trapped in the House chamber as terrorists pounded on the doors, than I was during 9/11 when we were quickly escorted to safety." - Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee on ALL In last night

"The moral case is clear. Trump has the blood of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on his hands. Legal analysts can debate whether Trump’s speech met the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, but it’s irrelevant to an impeachment. Everyone except his most sophistical apologists agrees that Trump whipped up the mob.." - Brett Stephens, 'Only Impeachment Can Save Republicans', NY Times

"What is beyond argument is a fact: there was a violent takeover of Congress–the representative arm of the U.S. government–as it was discharging its constitutional duties, and this takeover was incited by, and then justified by, Donald Trump, the sitting president of the U.S."- Jeffrey Isaac, 'Trump, The Coup and the Collusion That Made It Possible', smirkingchimp.com

"Call me old-fashioned, but when the president of the United States encourages armed insurgents to breach the Capitol and threaten the physical safety of Congress, in order to remain in power, I call it an attempted coup. Last week’ rampage left five dead, including a Capitol Hill police officer who was injured when he tangled with the pro-Trump mob. We’re fortunate the carnage wasn’t greater." - Robert Reich, Permalink

The insipid - and at once insidious - question, posed in The Sunday Denver Post header: Should the president be held accountable? had the same ring as asking: Should The Terrorist Osama Bin Laden Have Been Held Accountable for the 9/11 Attacks? Hyperbolic comparison? Histrionic? Excessive? Not at all. Bin Laden had orchestrated a vicious Al Qaeda attack on the capital of American finance, while Donald J. Trump had orchestrated a domestic terror attack on the nation's Capitol - its abiding symbol of democracy. Yes, many more were killed in the first, but as we've since learned, many more could have been slaughtered in the second, e.g. from the NY Times (Sunday):

"It was such an embarrassingly bad failure and immediately became an infamous moment in American history,” said R.P. Eddy, a former American counterterrorism official and diplomat who now runs a private intelligence firm. “But it could have been so much worse.”

Eddy was referring to the mass of weapons subsequently seized including styrofoam- laden Molotov cocktails designed to act like napalm, pipe bombs ready to activate, assault rifles and the vow of many of the invaders to execute lawmakers. As one ABC security specialist put it yesterday morning "We narrowly averted a mass casualty event."

So let's cut the crap and admit - even as more images and evidence emerge from the Capitol insurrection- that what Trump did was unconscionable and differed from Osama bin Laden's external terror strike only in degree. As I noted in my January 7 post:

"As for the chief terrorist he ought to have been hung by now. But at the very least he needs to be impeached again to ensure he can never again hold a public office. Yes, this is what it has come to and how far our nation has descended into the abyss under this detestable, depraved criminal rat."

The article referenced in the Post noted numerous reasons for not going forward with impeachment, as the House Democrats have begun the process yesterday. But most were based on specious rationalizations, i.e. "under Senate rules a trial could not begin until January 19th." In other words, two days before Joe Biden is inaugurated. But this misses the point. That is, options exist which do not confront a deadline. These are:

1) As Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe has noted, an impeachment can be done without involving the Senate. Thus, impeach but no Senate trial - especially when the needed two- thirds majority to convict does not exist. The impeachment is still registered historically, and in this case Trump becomes the only president to be impeached twice.

2) Pursue an expedited impeachment, and the House can delay sending articles to the Senate for 100 days, which will mean ending up in the Dem-controlled Senate. There may then be the added Republican votes- who knows? - to convict and thence ensure this maggot never holds a federal office again. As former DOJ prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg noted yesterday:

"Because what he did was so bad, and because the added penalty may attend of barring him from ever federal office again, it's clear that impeachment should go forward." Adding that:

"The insurrection was the attempt by an armed mob to interfere with the electoral vote count, and to thwart that, to upset it, to stop it from happening. And this is not something that sprang up organically on January 6th. This is something Trump has been talking about over and over an over again. And that is why inciting this mob to insurrection and encouraging them - telling them they were doing the right thing and fighting for his electoral victory is so troubling. And this is why the article of impeachment I've seen today makes the case that when a president encourages a mob to thwart the electoral count it was an act of insurrection designed to undermine our democracy. And in and of itself an impeachable offense."

In effect, any argument against impeachment is de facto an argument in favor of legitimizing insurrection and the undermining of our democracy by any future president. Such an argument deliberately diminishes the nature of insurrection, and by extension the value of our democratic Republic.

This is supported by constitutional scholar Michael J. Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina who told the NY Times:

"We've never even had to consider the possibility of impeaching a president twice in the final days of his presidency. But we've never had a president before who's encouraged sedition as Trump has done in his last few days in office."

Historian Michael Beschloss has put what happened January 6th in even more stark terms, speaking on MSNBC yesterday afternoon:

"An attempted overthrow of our government has never in American history included the president of the United States. We Americans have never before been in a situation when a president with all his awesome power tried to incite an attack on the Capitol and congress. An act that might have involved an assassination attempt against Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi, with people shouting for that- or some kind of hostage taking. This was a horrible event, but almost in a way we're not paying enough attention to."

The above points are key in skewering the "arguments" advanced (i.e. in the Post article) against impeachment. Among those are the following:

Lindsey Graham, again showing once a weasel always a weasel, arguing on Hannity's Friday FOX show that Trump already delivered "a message for healing and reconciliation" so such a harsh move as impeachment was no longer necessary. Conveniently omitting that no sooner had Dotard delivered tht video message then he railed in a rage about doing so.

Former Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow calling a second impeachment a "gigantic mistake" on a conservo radio show. In this case Sekulow - like others bellowing this rubbish - is clearly ok with legitimizing insurrection, and fully allowing the deranged orange maggot to run again in 4 years if he so wishes.

Then there is emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz who insisted: "Trump's speech, whatever one may think of it on the merits, is protected by the First Amendment." No it is not! And as former DOJ prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg pointed out it wasn't "one speech" - it was months and months of lying and appealing to sedition at his rallies. Trump had no more "first amendment rights" than going to multiple crowded theaters and shouting 'Fire!' in each of them.

Finally, Jonathan Turley - the George Washington University law professor who testified against Trump's first impeachment dismissed this latest impeachment as a "rush to judgment out of partisan anger" and "Only interested in the outcome" since the alternative of invoking the 25th amendment was also part of it. Hence, Pelosi and Company "are not interested in the legitimacy of the method."

But as historians Gerhardt and Beschloss have pointed out, given Trump spent months working his crowds into a seditious lather these objections are little more than legalistic nitpicking. The same sort Turley trotted out in his earlier impeachment objections. Then, Turley tried to use language parsing and hair -splitting to argue there was an "insufficient threshold" to impeach. (This is the same turkey who - some 20 years earlier- said that Bill Clinton had to be impeached for a sexual peccadillo.)

According to Turley at the time there was no "real bribery" by Trump, i.e. that met the standard for impeachment, nor any obstruction. Evidently Turley believed for the latter to genuinely happen the Dems would have to produce "real" evidence - given that what existed didn't count. He was taken down at that time also by Prof. Gerhardt, who stated:

“If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable,”

Turley earned a degree of mini-infamy by insisting there needed to be an actual felony as a prerequisite to impeach, which prompted MSNBC legal analyst Ari Melber to take him down:

"There's a larger stupidity here which is important, because Americans are watching this. You don't need an underlying crime to remove a president. And the reason is very simple; There's all sorts of things that are criminal but are not an abuse of power. It is a felony to deface a mailbox. But definitely not impeachable. I don't think you'll find serious scholars who'd suggest otherwise. And yet, that would be the needed crime in what Turley said was the extra prerequisite he wants to add.

And on the flip side you have abuses of power that may not be a felony, which is important for everyone to understand. Why? Because most citizens don't have those powers to wield. So you don't have laws that say 'you can't steal money from the OMB to give to a foreign country' because most people aren't in any position to seize and appropriate those funds. So for this professor Turley to say no, you still gotta double back to the courts, well that's just not what the Constitution says. "

In the current impeachment, Turley's objections are just as rank and stupid. Basically claiming: "This opportunistic use of impeachment would do to the Constitution what the rioters did to the Capitol, leave it in tatters."

In other words, turn a blind eye to the insurrection and Trump's incitement of it- despite the Constitution specifically naming insurrection in Section 3 of the 14th amendment - which prohibits "any person who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States...from holding any office under these United States." This clause was added after the Civil War, to provide a remedy for any future traitors, rebels, insurrectionists or secessionists.

Given impeachment and conviction is precisely the remedy that would fulfill that need with Trump, then what Turley is advising is: "Ignore the 14th amendment of the Constitution and Trump's insurrection because you'll leave the Constitution in equal tatters if you go through with it."

In other words, another irrational, halfwit "Turleyism" of the sort Ari Melber skewered in an earlier iteration. Or shall we say, a Turley "get out of insurrection" - free card.

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