Donald Trump is up against a wall
Right now, Donald Trump is Schrödinger’s president. Much like the eponymous cat, he is caught in between two states and it is not an enjoyable situation for him at all.
As Palmer Report explained earlier, Republicans are touting the notion that Donald Trump has not really been impeached because the Senate has not (yet) received the Articles of Impeachment that were passed by the House on Wednesday. Prof. Noah Feldman, who was one of the experts speaking about the legal grounds for Donald Trump’s impeachment in a congressional hearing just a short while ago, explains the underlying technicalities in an article published by Bloomberg. “So far,” Feldman says, “the House has voted to impeach (future tense) Trump. He isn’t impeached (past tense) until the articles go to the Senate and the House members deliver the message.” Numerous legal experts disagree.
Feldman clearly states that “the Constitution doesn’t say how fast the articles must go to the Senate. Some modest delay is not inconsistent with the Constitution, or how both chambers usually work.” This means that Speaker Pelosi was on solid legal ground when she refused to tell the press or anyone else after Wednesday’s historic vote at which time she plans to send the House’s impeachment managers to the Senate with the two ratified articles.
In the Bloomberg article, the legal expert also points out the following: “Once the articles are sent, the Senate has a constitutional duty to hold a trial on the impeachment charges presented. Failure for the Senate to hold a trial after impeachment would deviate from the Constitution’s clear expectation.” Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has already acknowledged that he will be obliged to hold a trial once the Articles of Impeachment reach his chamber. McConnell has also taken the unprecedented step of publicly announcing that he plans to give this momentous process the bare minimum of time and that all his actions will be coordinated with the White House. Perhaps this brazen statement was a mistake on the Senate Leader’s part because it has clearly galvanized the Democrats in general and Nancy Pelosi in particular. By leaving Donald Trump in limbo and with the sword of impeachment hanging over his head on a very thin thread, Pelosi is now maximizing the pain for Donald Trump.
The Whiner-in-Chief has already made several statements and fired off a number of tweets in which he complains that what the House Speaker is doing is unfair and that Democrats “are playing games”. He is clearly unhappy because their strategy of sitting on the articles is delaying the moment in which he can take a victory lap after his Republican sycophants in the Senate have voted not to indict and remove him. Donald Trump is currently under impeachment and it is eating away at him. This became very much apparent when the result of the impeachment vote reached him while he was in the middle of one of his hate rallies. At that moment, Trump’s already outlandishly orange complexion switched to a deep red and he completely flew off the handle, insulting and attacking just about every one of his opponents, dead or alive.
It is safe to expect that his uncontrolled public outbreaks will continue as long as the question of his impeachment remains unsettled, and in the process, he will keep showing his true colors to American voters, making it harder and harder for those who are not fully committed to the cult of Trump to cast their votes in his favor. By keeping the impeachment process in limbo for an unspecified period of time, congressional Democrats are playing the hand they have been dealt as well as they possibly can, and – in the words of one Donald Trump – we’ll see what happens.
