WSJ Editorial Board And Mc Connell Refuse To Let Trump Off The Hook. Biden's Miserable Start. Haters Get Plucked.

The WSJ Editorial Board and McConnell will not let Trump off the hook.

Trump’s Non-Vindication

He may run again, but he won’t win another national election.

By The Editorial Board

The Senate failed Saturday to convict Donald Trump on the single House impeachment article of inciting an insurrection, but the 57-43 vote was no vindication. The statements by Senators who voted to acquit make clear that he escaped conviction mainly—perhaps only—because he is no longer President.

Seven Republicans joined every Democrat in the most bipartisan conviction vote in history. While short of the 67 votes needed to convict, most Republicans didn’t defend Mr. Trump’s words or actions on Jan. 6 or his attempts to overturn the election. As we’ve written before, Mr. Trump’s behavior was inexcusable and will mar his legacy for all time.

That was the essence of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s post-trial remarks. The GOP leader voted against conviction but explicitly because he said the Constitution reserves the impeachment power only for Presidents while in office. Scholars disagree on this point, and there are good arguments on both sides. Mr. McConnell leaned on the writing of the 19th-century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. But he also noted that impeaching a private citizen had no “limiting principle,” and could set a dangerous precedent.

This is no mere “technicality,” as Democrats and their media echoes are calling it. Democrats spent days invoking the Constitution in the trial, but suddenly it’s a technicality after the trial. Most Republicans also cited the constitutional claim that Mr. McConnell used to justify acquittal, as did the Senators in 1876 who acquitted the former Secretary of War, William Belknap, after he had resigned in the only other ex-post trial.

 But Mr. McConnell was lacerating in his criticism of Mr. Trump’s words and actions, which he blamed for deceiving and motivating supporters who had assembled on Jan. 6 at the President’s urging and became a mob. “Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” Mr. McConnell said. “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

He added that the rioters had been “fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth–because he was angry he’d lost an election.”

All of this was compounded by Mr. Trump’s failure to act with dispatch to call off the rioters once he heard what was happening. Mr. Trump’s defenders blame Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the District of Columbia government for lack of preparedness, which is fair enough. Some of the riot leaders may also have pre-planned the assault, and there is much police still haven’t disclosed.

But none of that absolves Mr. Trump for refusing for hours to ask his supporters to stand down. Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 early-afternoon comments to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy dismissing a plea to call off the rioters, as related second-hand by GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, are further evidence of Mr. Trump’s dereliction. As Mr. McConnell also noted, Senate acquittal does not absolve Mr. Trump of potential criminal or civil liability for actions he took in office.

As for the seven GOP Senators who voted to convict, they deserve respect for their independent judgment. As Edmund Burke famously explained to the Bristol electors in 1774, “It is his duty [as a Member of Parliament] to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.”

Senators Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey in particular offered explanations rooted in constitutional principle. Local or state GOP committees that vote to censure them are playing into the hands of Democrats, whose goal has been to divide Republicans over loyalty to one man—Donald Trump.

On that point, what next? In her fury on Saturday, Mrs. Pelosi ruled out a vote of censure. But Democrats in the Trump era have already turned impeachment into a form of censure. We’d still support such a resolution, though not if it includes language from Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment barring Mr. Trump from holding federal office again.

That would result in another partisan vote and let Mr. Trump tell his supporters that elites are disenfranchising them. Mr. McConnell might have cited this as another argument for Senate acquittal, since conviction would have led to a simple majority vote to disqualify Mr. Trump. Far better to trust the voters to render their judgment if Mr. Trump chooses to run again.

This is also the context in which to understand Mr. McConnell’s vote and his post-trial statement. Like Mike Pompeo, Paul Ryan and many others, Mr. McConnell has spent the years since 2016 navigating the respect he owes the voters who elected Mr. Trump and the President’s profound character flaws.

This wasn’t “enabling” Mr. Trump. The voters did that in 2016, aided by the Democrats who nominated Hillary Clinton. For four years Mr. Trump’s conduct stayed largely within constitutional bounds—no matter his rhetorical excesses and Democratic efforts to drive him from office by violating norms and flogging conspiracy theories. But Mr. Trump’s dishonest challenge to the 2020 election, even after multiple defeats in court, clearly broke those bounds and culminated in the Jan. 6 riot.

Mr. Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election. He lost re-election before the events of Jan. 6, and as President his job approval never rose above 50%. He may go on a revenge campaign tour, or run as a third-party candidate, but all he will accomplish is to divide the center-right and elect Democrats. The GOP’s defeats in the two Jan. 5 Georgia Senate races proved that.

The country is moving past the Trump Presidency, and the GOP will remain in the wilderness until it does too.

And:

Acquittal Vindicated the Constitution, Not Trump

Impeachment isn’t a moral tribunal. It is a specific tool with a narrow purpose: restraining government officers

By Mitch McConnell

Jan. 6 was a shameful day. A mob bloodied law enforcement and besieged the first branch of government. American citizens tried to use terrorism to stop a democratic proceeding they disliked.

There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone. His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended.

I was as outraged as any member of Congress. But senators take our own oaths. Our job wasn’t to find some way, any way, to inflict a punishment. The Senate’s first and foundational duty was to protect the Constitution.

Some brilliant scholars believe the Senate can try and convict former officers. Others don’t. The text is unclear, and I don’t begrudge my colleagues their own conclusions. But after intense study, I concluded that Article II, Section 4 limits impeachment and conviction to current officers.

Everyone agrees that “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” exhaust the valid grounds for conviction. It follows that the list of persons in that sentence—“the president, vice president, and all civil officers”—likewise exhausts its valid subjects.

If that list of current officers is not exhaustive, there is no textual limit. The House’s “sole power of impeachment” and the Senate’s “sole power to try all impeachments” would constitute an unlimited circular logic with no stopping point at former officers. Any private citizen could be disqualified. This is why one House manager had to argue the Senate possesses “absolute, unqualified” jurisdiction. But nobody really accepts that.

I side with the early constitutional scholar Justice Joseph Story. He observed that while disqualification is optional, removal is mandatory on conviction. The Constitution presupposes that anyone convicted by the Senate must have an office from which to be removed. This doesn’t mean leaving office provides immunity from accountability. Former officials are “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.” Criminal law and civil litigation ensure there is no so-called January exemption.

There is a modern reflex to demand total satisfaction from every news cycle. But impeachment is not some final moral tribunal. It is a specific tool with a narrow purpose: restraining government officers. The instant Donald Trump ceased being the president, he exited the Senate’s jurisdiction.

I respect senators who reached the opposite answer. What deserve no respect are claims that constitutional concerns are trivialities that courageous senators would have ignored.

One House manager who lauded the Constitution when the trial began now derides it as “a technicality.” Another called this pivotal question “a loophole.” Talking heads fumed that senators had let legal niceties constrain us. I even heard that only senators who voted for conviction had any right to abhor the violence. That’s antithetical to any notion of American justice. Liberals said they condemned the former president’s rules-be-damned recklessness. But many apparently cannot resist that same temptation.

Consider the claim that I could have steered around the jurisdictional issue by recalling the Senate between Jan. 14 and Jan. 20, while Mr. Trump was still in office.

The salient date is not the trial’s start but the end, when the penalty of removal from office must be possible. No remotely fair or regular Senate process could have started and finished in less than one week. Even the brisk impeachment process we just concluded took 19 days. The pretrial briefing period alone—especially vital after such a rushed and minimal House process—consumed more than a week.

President Biden, who knows the Senate, stated as early as Jan. 8 that his swearing-in was the “quickest” possible path to changing the occupant of the White House. Especially since the House didn’t vote until Jan. 13, any legitimate Senate process was certain to end after Inauguration Day.

Here’s what the scheduling critics are really saying: Senate Republicans should have followed a rushed House process with a light-speed Senate sham. They think we should have shredded due process and ignited a constitutional crisis in a footrace to outrun our loss of jurisdiction.

This selective disregard for rules and norms is a civic disease that is spreading through the political left. Senate Democrats relished the legislative filibuster and used it frequently when they were the minority party. Now only two of them pledge to respect it. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened Supreme Court justices by name, and other Democrats submitted a brief demanding the court rule their way or be “restructured.” As recently as September, fewer than half of Democrats professed confidence that elections are free and fair. In November, that number shot up to more than 90%—because they liked the result.

The nation needs real constitutional champions, not fair-weather institutionalists. The Senate’s duty last week was clear. It wasn’t to guarantee a specific punishment at any cost. Our job was to defend the Constitution and respect its limits. That is what our acquittal delivered.

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Biden's rough start is not a function of luck but sheer incompetence and pettiness and , in my humble opinion, matters will only worsen.

Biden’s Rough Start With the World

This has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.

By Walter Russell Mead

It hasn’t been the most promising start. Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, and his administration is already engaged in spats with China, Russia and Iran. It is also discovering that U.S. allies are not quite as happy with Mr. Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that “America is back” as many Democrats might have hoped.

In Asia the administration’s Myanmar policy—imposing sanctions that signal displeasure without materially affecting the army’s ability to rule—has attracted little enthusiasm. On Feb 15, India’s foreign minister hailed Indo-Japanese cooperation on regional infrastructure projects that link Myanmar with its neighbors, a not-so-subtle signal that India intends to go on cooperating with Myanmar no matter what Washington wants. Simultaneously, the large portion of the Indian press that supports the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is aflame with resentment that Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena Harris, seems to be siding with protesters against BJP policies.

European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.

In the Middle East, Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction. As for restless NATO ally Turkey, Mr. Biden promised during the campaign to help President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition. The new administration has so far criticized a crackdown on pro-LGBTQ student demonstrators and called on Ankara to release the dissident Osman Kavala.

Closer to home, the unceremonious cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline miffed Canadians. The Biden administration appears headed for a fight with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over deforestation in the Amazon basin—a sensitive issue for the Brazilian right. Mexico’s left-populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador delayed congratulating Mr. Biden on his election, passed a law limiting U.S.-Mexican collaboration over drug trafficking, and offered political asylum to Julian Assange.

On the other hand, at least relations with Cuba are expected to improve.

This is not as bad as it looks. Given the large shifts between Trump- and Biden-era policies, some turbulence was inevitable. Other countries will adjust to the new priorities over time, and policy rollouts will become smoother as the new team settles in.

But fleeting as some of these tensions will hopefully prove, they do point to trouble ahead. The Biden administration has an ambitious agenda, and many allies prefer a quiescent U.S. to an activist one.

Americans often assume that other countries see U.S. leadership as a global public good, are grateful to Washington for providing it, and like us more the more we lead. It doesn’t always work that way. Other governments tend to see U.S. leadership as, at best, a necessary evil. Only a very few countries, most of them small and weak, like the idea of an American-led world order, and virtually all of our allies want as much order with as little leadership as they can get.

If Uncle Sam’s World Order Café were a business, some of its customers would order a double helping of security protection with a side of development assistance—but hold the human rights. Some would want no security at all, merely the house salad of mixed-green policies with a nice light dressing of human rights on the side. Regardless of their varied individual preferences, all the customers want an à la carte menu. Nobody is looking for the chef’s choice.

For the Biden foreign-policy agenda, this is a problem. Driven by existential concerns about climate change, the erosion of democracy world-wide, and the rise of China, the new administration wants more U.S. allies to take difficult stands in support of Washington’s global vision. This is not going to be popular.

Many governments in Asia share U.S. concerns about China but feel threatened by America’s propensity to proselytize for democracy. In the Middle East, key aspects of the Biden agenda alienate virtually everyone. Many Latin Americans see Chinese money and influence as a healthy offset to U.S. hemispheric dominance. While Europeans share some American concerns about China and Russia, Paris and Berlin see little reason to accept Washington’s prescriptions for dealing with them.

The Biden administration sees a renewed American commitment to multilateralism as a way to sign allies up to an ambitious U.S.-led agenda. But many allies, even close and deeply democratic ones, embrace multilateralism as a way to limit America’s ability to press policies on them that they don’t like.

Interesting times lie ahead.

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The beautiful thing about a free and capitalist society is when traditional entities fail entrepreneurial opportunities abound and produce other entities to take their place The mass media went off the deep end and technology provided alternatives. In this instance Barnum was proven correct. The haters were plucked for the suckers they were.

Join the Lincoln Project, Drive Off With a Lemon

With convenient timing, the media discover the anti-Trumpers aren’t all they were cracked up to be.

By  Gerard Baker

 

‘A Ford, not a Lincoln” was how the self-deprecating 38th president memorably described himself on taking office. A decent man up against impossible odds, Gerald Ford’s self-estimation was shared by the American people, who drove him unceremoniously off the dealer’s lot of history and parked him out back.

There’s no such modesty in our modern political age. When a group of former Republican political consultants came together a little over a year ago to do what they could to destroy the Republican president, they saw no presumption in calling themselves the Lincoln Project. IBE

Now that we know a little more about the performance and standards of the group, it looks more like the Edsel Project. Like its automotive predecessor, it was an expensive and wasteful machine that sucked a lot of money from overoptimistic, slightly credulous and ultimately very disappointed financial backers.

The collective’s name was intended to evoke not a high-caliber car but the highest-caliber president. That’s where it really fell short. The more we learn about the antics of this posse of political opportunists, the more resemblance they bear to the 45th president, whose character they deprecated, rather than the 16th, whose mantle they preposterously claimed

Using a political campaign as a vessel for personal financial aggrandizement, thriving on the oxygen supplied by an endless succession of ratings-hungry television hosts, deploying a rare knack for nasty personal and vituperative rhetoric, and in the case of one of them, allegedly indulging a voracious appetite for sexual predation—if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these guys must have idolized Donald Trump. As with most self-conscious ideologically pure movements in history, they’ve wound up like the revolutionaries in “Animal Farm”: You look from the troughing Trumpers to the guzzling Never Trumpers and find it hard to spot the difference,

The real import of the brief history of the Lincoln Project, though, is not the familiar one of venal political consultants and hypocritical partisans, but the complicity of the media in facilitating their racket. Stories were already circulating last year about some dubious aspects of their enterprise: how much of the money they’d raised was funding their own lucrative businesses; rumors that one of them had a penchant to proposition unsuspecting young men by dangling employment opportunities.

But it wasn’t until last month that news organizations that proclaim themselves pursuers of the truth without fear or favor began to publish damaging stories: the Associated Press weighed in, then the New York Times and others.

The significance is the timing: It wasn’t until the election was over and Joe Biden safely on his way to the presidency that our media vigilantes finally decided it was time to tell the darker side of the people those same vigilantes had bathed in light for so long.

This wasn’t the only example in which media forbearance ahead of the election gave way to a sudden rediscovery of accountability afterward. The most notorious was the attempt by multiple news outlets to discredit our sister paper, the New York Post, for reporting on Hunter Biden a few weeks before the election, and the technology companies’ successful efforts to thwart circulation of the story. When the election was over, that story was also deemed safe to be conveyed to the wider American electorate and reported by CNN and the broadcast networks, among others.

Revelations about the Lincoln Project ahead of the election might not have changed the outcome, but they would surely have muffled the organization’s hysterical anti-Republican messaging in the final days of the campaign. Wider circulation of the Hunter Biden story—and journalistic competition to dig deeper—might well have swayed some voters.

It makes you wonder what other stories are out there that may be unveiled only now that their political impact is likely to be less harmful to Democrats.

It’s tedious to rant endlessly about media bias, and some of the complaints are overdone. In the past 20 years alternative sources of news have flourished—though it’s worth noting that recently there has been an active campaign from much of the big media to have those sources shut down.

But the terms of the national conversation—the political context and cultural environment in which we operate—are still largely drawn by traditional media companies. The Lincoln Project was forced to start accounting for itself only last week when its erstwhile media allies picked up the stories less friendly outlets had first aired.

Those media organizations’ continuing ability to frame what gets talked about and, even more important, what doesn’t get talked about weakens our democracy. The evidence of the 2020 campaign is that they are determined to wield it more than ever before in a politically tendentious direction.

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