Impeachment II over, most Senate Republican refuse to convict, give Trump a new free pass on high crimes and misdemeanors

Trump Impeachment II is now over. A distinct majority of the Republicans in the House and the Senate were unwilling to hold their Leader Trump responsible for even the most serious kinds of misconduct in office. The long bipartisan consensus on not holding Republican Presidents and their administrations formally accountable for even criminal conduct has at least been breached. And that's progress.

But now it's critical for federal and state officials to conduct genuinely professional, independent investigations of the Trump Administration's misconduct. John Dean puts it this way:

While I have been sharing thoughts on CNN about impeachment I have not tweeted until now. The Republican Party has confirmed they are, as I reported in my last book, the authoritarian party. They are Un-American and dangerous. We must all hope Trump is jailed for his many crimes!

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) February 14, 2021

We found out during the impeachment trial that the lynch mob on January 6 was very close to getting Mike Pence, although I'm sure his Secret Service detail would have put up a serious fight. Pence had the second "nuclear football" with him that contains the nuclear launch codes. The insurrectionists couldn't have used it to launch any missiles. But that would have still been one of the worst security breaches ever. (Barbara Starr and Caroline Kelly, Military officials were unaware of potential danger to Pence's 'nuclear football' during Capitol riot 02/12/2021)

Washington Sen. Patty Murray gave a memorable interview on her experience during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, Sen. Patty Murray recounts her narrow escape from a violent mob inside the U.S. Capitol 02/13/2021:

Heather Cox Richardson described the revelations from Friday in her 01/12/2021 Facebook post. She also calls out this important point about how Trump's legal team used the trial to promote his central political Big Lie:

... Trump’s lawyers refused to say that he lost the election. Trump’s big lie, the lie that has driven his attack on our democracy, is that the outcome of the 2020 election was rigged and that, in reality, he won it in a landslide. There is no merit to this argument. It has been dismissed by state election boards across the country and by our courts, including the Supreme Court. But he continues to refuse to concede the election, fueling a movement that threatens to create a long-term domestic insurgency. His lawyers today endorsed that position.

Jamie Gangel et al report in New details about Trump-McCarthy shouting match show Trump refused to call off the rioters CNN 02/13/2020 on new evidence produced showing even more clearly that Trump new what dangers Members of Congress were in during the insurrection and deliberately refused to send aid, clearly citing with the attackers he had organized and directly incited.

Cenk Uygur gives his take on the story in Breaking: Trump Would Not Call Off the Rioters! TYT 02/12/2021

The facts that came out this past week made me realize that the coup came a lot closer to succeeding than I had thought. It was still a clown coup because it was run by malicious clowns. And it's still true what Timothy Snyder wrote afterwards, that the Orange Clown failed to get enough of the right people to do the wrong thing for it to succeed.

But if the mob had succeeded in murdering Mike Pence and maybe a few Members of Congress - and if they had managed to take possession of Pence's nuclear football - that could have been an excuse for declaring martial law and shutting down Congress to prevent the formal certification of the Presidential election. I thought it was especially chilling what Patty Murray said in her PBS interview embedded above, that the mob outside her office door were chanting "Kill the Infidels!"

That thing came close to being more a bloodbath than it was. The lynch mob was able to engage in continuous fighting with the Capitol police for at least a couple of hours, and there was obviously a very clear plan to withhold outside assistance.

Also, hearing and seeing more details about how bad the situation in the Capitol was, how tactically coordinated much of it was, and how close they came to killing Members of Congress, I'm wondering again: Haven't we spent nearly 20 years waging a "Global War on Terror"? I'm old enough to remember when advocates for the Iraq War said that we have to fight Them over there so we won't have to fight Them over here.

And after all that, a bunch of Rambo wannabes were able to stage the January 6 occupation of the US Capitol? And prowl around inside for hours chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Kill the Infidels!"?

There is something really wrong with this picture.

We can always hope, and there was at least a slim theoretical possibility that enough Republicans would vote to convict to make it official. Depending on how involved some of them may have been with planning or coordinating the event, some of the Senators might have decided to vote for conviction as a way to mitigate possible criminal charges against them.

But the fact is that a Republican like Kevin McCarthy even after his now-infamous call with Trump during the Capitol raid still went down to Mar-O-Lago to kiss the Leader's ring. That doesn't look like even a normal sense of physical self-preservation to me, much less integrity or responsibility. And that is clearly the dominant position among Congressional Republicans, as both impeachments of Trump have shown.

But to be fair, they also know they do face a non-trivial risk of being assassinated by a Trump cult follower if they come out openly against him. It's not an excuse for them, as the Senate Republican votes to convict illustrate. But it's part of the grim reality of Trumpified national politics in the US: