All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

Op-Eds

Impeachment: Why the Senate Will Acquit Trump

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US House of Representatives votes on Trump's second impeachment. Public Domain.
US House of Representatives votes on Trump’s second impeachment. Public Domain.

As I write this, the US Senate is cranking up for its trial of former President Donald J. Trump. The House impeached Trump on January 13, a week before the end of his term, on one article charging him with “incitement of insurrection” in the form of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

Even Trump’s most ardent opponents hold out little hope of conviction. That would require the votes of 67 US Senators, at least 17 of whom would have to be Republicans. And 45 of 50 Republican Senators have already voted against holding the trial at all, on grounds that it would be “unconstitutional” because Trump is no longer president.

It’s not unconstitutional. The Constitution’s plain language,  precedent in both US and pre-revolutionary British practice, and a common sense holding that the founders would not prescribe a penalty (disqualification from future office) that could be rendered toothless by resignation, make it clear that an official can be tried (and impeached) after leaving office. In fact, some Republicans advocated doing exactly that to former Vice-President Joe Biden only months ago over his alleged corruption vis a vis Ukraine and Burisma.

Nor do other Republican excuses — that trying the impeachment would violate Trump’s First Amendment rights, for example, or that Chief Justice John Roberts is constitutionally required to preside at the trial — hold water. Impeachment is a political, not criminal, proceeding, to which the First Amendment is irrelevant. The Chief Justice presides at the trials of presidents, not former presidents (Democratic US Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont will preside at Trump’s trial).

Nor do those excuses explain why Republicans will almost unanimously vote to acquit, any more than an honest belief in Trump’s guilt explains why Democrats will unanimously or almost unanimously vote to convict.

What does explain the nearly inevitable outcome? That the trial is, as I mentioned, a political proceeding.

House Democrats voted to impeach, and Senate Democrats will vote to convict, because they believe doing so improves their personal political prospects and the political prospects of their party.

Most House Republicans voted against impeachment, and most Senate Republicans will vote to acquit, because they believe it’s the least bad option available where their personal and party political prospects are concerned.

“Least bad” isn’t “good,” but this is a “heads the Democrats win, tales the Republicans lose” situation.

Voting to convict exposes Republican Senators to primary challenges from Trump loyalists come next election, and possibly even a fatal split in the GOP itself.

Voting to acquit leaves them right where they were, with the rotting albatross of the Trump presidency hanging around their collective neck. It’s a tough call and probably leaves them in the congressional minority and out of White House contention for the next few years either way.

Trump’s actual guilt or innocence — which you may notice I’ve offered no opinion on — is as irrelevant to his second impeachment trial as it was to his first.

The moral of the story: Politics is very expensive, but not very suspenseful, dinner theater.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Better COVID-19 Vaccination Policy: Stick it to’em!

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RGBStock.com Vaccine Photo

As the federal government and state governments around the country roll out their COVID-19 vaccination programs, problems real and imagined abound.

The real problems include bottlenecks caused by limited availability, stringent storage requirements, and, most of all, the confusion and scheduling snafus that inevitably accompany large-scale mobilizations of resources.

The imagined problems boil down to belly-aching about how those who “should” be getting the vaccine aren’t getting it as soon as they “should,” and about how people who “shouldn’t” be getting it as soon are “jumping the line.”

At the extreme we hear claims that old “white” people shouldn’t be getting it before people of color for reasons ranging from the former being more at risk to older people having already lived enough and to payback for past institutional racism, the latter two of which are ghoulish. More on the reasonable side of things are complaints that some younger, less at risk, people are getting it before some older, more at risk, people.

Disclosure: I’ve already received my first jab and will go in next week to get my second, but I’m not displacing anyone else. I’m participating in the Phase III clinical trial for a new vaccine that hasn’t been approved yet. You’re welcome.

The biggest real problem is water under the bridge:  Governments always do things more expensively and less efficiently than markets. The Food and Drug Administration held up approval of the first vaccines for unnecessary months, and government inefficiency is almost certainly holding up your shots for unnecessary weeks.

Retrospectively, the best way to handle things would have been to push the state aside and let the market get this thing done quickly and cheaply. But instead of listening to anarchists like me, people just went along to get along yet again and are likely to continue doing so for some time.

We’re stuck with the worst possible way of doing things. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it.

How DO we make the best of it? If government policies were written in English, we’d look for something like this from President Biden and 50 governors:

“We’re shipping vaccines to hospitals and doctors and pharmacies as fast as we can, and ask them to put as many two-dose courses as they can in as many arms as they can, regardless of age, sex, race, or other considerations, using whatever scheduling and allocation methods they find work best.”

If the vaccines work, every immunized person is one person less likely to catch COVID-19 or pass it on, and puts us one step closer to hopefully achieving herd immunity.

Every vaccination administered is a win, if the goal is to reduce the numbers of cases, reduce the numbers of deaths, and hopefully bring this ugly era to an end.

Every missed opportunity to stick a needle in an arm is a loss on those same criteria.

Let’s stop letting jealousy over the ages, sexes, and races of the arms in question get in the way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Biden’s Iran Dilemma: Serve Obama’s Third Term — or Trump’s Second?

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English: The United Nations Security Council C...
English: The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Even before winning the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden began hedging his bets on US policy toward Iran. While correctly blaming Donald Trump for violating the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the Iran nuclear deal, he tried to fob responsibility for restoring that deal off on the Iranians rather than accepting the job himself.

“If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal,” he wrote in a September op-ed, “the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” Since taking office, he and new US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have held to that line.

Meanwhile the Iranian government has made it clear that since the US violated the deal first, and pressured other parties to it to violate it as well, the ball is in Biden’s court, not theirs. The US can go back to keeping its word or continue breaking its promises. Biden’s call …  and the clock is ticking.

“The time for the United States to come back to the nuclear agreement is not unlimited,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tells CNN. “The United States has a limited window of opportunity … The United States has to accept what we agreed upon.”

If becoming president is like celebrating Christmas, Biden woke up to a lump of coal in his stocking from Donald Trump and a big, fat, pretty box under the tree from Barack Obama.

The Trump lump is the risk of being seen as “soft on Iran” if he returns to the deal without extracting further concessions from Tehran.

Obama’s gift went under the tree in July of 2015 when he got the deal codified as a UN Security Council Resolution. The UN charter makes such resolutions binding on all member states. The US Senate duly ratified the UN charter as a treaty in 1945, making it, along with the Constitution, part of “the supreme law of the land.”

It’s not just true that Joe Biden CAN immediately and unilaterally return the US to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It’s also true that, legally, he MUST do so.

Not that modern US presidents trouble themselves very much over adherence to the Constitution or the law, of course. It’s still Biden’s choice to make. And where Iran is concerned, that choice is pretty simple: Does President Joe Biden want to serve Barack Obama’s third term, or Donald Trump’s second?

Think fast, Joe.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY