Toomey Doubts the Senate Will Convict | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the LifeZette. The author of this post is David Kamioner.

    Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, along with Ben Sasse of Nebraska, perhaps the sharpest members of the Senate, doubts the Senate will convict the immediately former president of "incitement of insurrection", regardless of any evidence pro or con.

    FNC: "Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who has been a top critic of former President Trump and called for him to resign after last month's riot at the Capitol, said in an interview Sunday that it is unlikely that the Senate will vote for a conviction on the one count of 'incitement of insurrection.' The 50-50 Senate is preparing for another trial that many Republicans say will serve no purpose other than to fuel the divide the country. They say Democrats want nothing more than to score political points with the trial and get one last parting shot in against Trump."

    "You did have 45 Republican senators vote to suggest that they didn't think it was appropriate to conduct a trial, so you can infer how likely it is that those folks will vote to convict," Toomey told press. Toomey is correct. The trial is a sham, a waste of time, meaningless Democrat show and tell with a preordained win for the immediately former president. As such, in related news, Michigan State Professor Brian Kalt wonders why the Trump defense team took one of his articles out of context. With a slam dunk win coming up, why the stretch?

    "The article favored late impeachability, but it set out all the evidence I found on both sides-lots for them to use," Kalt said. "But in several places, they misrepresent what I wrote quite badly."

    A "more problematic thing" he noticed, was that "they suggest that I was endorsing an argument when what I actually did was note that argument - and reject it."

    "When a President is no longer in office, the objective of an impeachment ceases," a Trump memo said, citing page 66 of Kalt's article.

    But Kalt posted a screenshot of pages 66 and 67. He says that this argument "has textual appeal" and "an admitted degree coherence," citing Article II Section 4 of the Constitution, which refers to the removal of the "President, Vice President and all civil Officers[.]" He said that by mentioning "Officers," this would seem not to apply to former officers.

    "Late impeachment, so the argument goes, which is also not self-evident," the footnote continues, "would have also required specification if the Framers wished to include it as a possibility." Kalt then cites page 37 of the article, showing some states discuss late impeachment in their constitutions.

    "Citing me that way, they make it sound like I was making that argument. But I wasn't. On page 37, I raise that argument as something a critic might say, and then I refute it...A critic of late impeachment could argue that things like two-thirds majority requirements are not self-evident, and therefore require specification; and that late impeachment is similarly counterintuitive...Therefore, allowing late impeachment is the self-evident proposition, not the counterintuitive one, and failure to explicitly bar it while specifying other limitations on the impeachment power is a telling omission."