Donald Trump’s historic impeachment trial starts in US Senate

Republicans beat back 11 amendments by Democrats to bring in witnesses

NEW YORK: The historic trial of Donald Trump has begun in the US Senate with Democratic prosecutors from the House of Representatives and his lawyers sparred, while the US President was 6,500 kilometers away in Davos hobnobbing with the world’s elite.

Republicans beat back 11 amendments by Democrats to bring in witnesses and new evidence and change the rules for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump during a marathon sitting that stretched into Wednesday and finally adopted the ground rules.

At the trial that began on Tuesday afternoon under the presidency of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the acrimonious partisanship was on full display as the Senate tried to set the stage for the trial Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell demonstrated his hold over his flock as the amendments were swiftly voted down along party lines, with all the 53 Republicans voting against the amendments and for the rules he proposed, while the votes of the 45 Democrats and the two independents were the reverse. Trump was 6,500 kilometers away in Davos hobnobbing with the world’s elite at the World Economic Forum when in Washington he became only the third of the 45 presidents in the nation’s 243-year history to go on trial before the Senate after impeachment by the House of Representatives.

There he repeated his denunciation of the impeachment as a “joke” and a “hoax”, and turned attention to the economic successes of his presidency that he said made the American dream “bigger better and stronger.” The Senators, who are the jurors in the trial, sat through the eleven-and-a-half-hour session with a dinner break, virtually chained to their desks deprived of their mobile phones, tablets, and computers and ordered to stay silent like jurors in a courtroom.

After the prosecutors and the Trump defense team complete the 24 hours of arguments for each side spread over three days each, the Senators have 16 hours to question them - but they can’t do it directly and have to route them through the Chief Justice.

They will vote at the end of the trial to either convict or acquit Trump. A two-thirds vote is required to convict and remove him from office - which makes his conviction unlikely and reduces the trial and the three months of the secret and public impeachment hearings and investigations to catharsis for the Democrats smarting from the party’s defeat by Trump in 2016. They also see the impeachment and the trial as an opportunity to publicly shame Trump and turn voters against him in the November election. (IANS)

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