RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/trump-trial-puts-fundamental-question-to-chief-justice-roberts/

It’s a murky situation that could see none other than Vice President Harris preside.

B efore the Senate holds an impeachment trial, as many conservative and liberal writers advise, it should understand the serious constitutional issues at stake. Chief among them is whether the Senate can try a defendant who has left office. Another one, less noticed, is who would serve as the trial judge. Carefully read, the constitutional text may even allow the chief justice of the Supreme Court to scuttle the whole affair, or at the very least open up a political minefield that could cripple the new administration. The Senate would better serve the national interest simply by allowing Donald Trump to depart — which, after all, is the main objective of impeachment — rather than holding a long trial solely to disqualify him from future office.

We have written before about the constitutional challenges to impeaching Trump. He was involved in the odious attack on the Capitol during the January 6 counting of the Electoral College votes. But the current rush to impeach and try Trump may imperil multiple constitutional values.

First, the House carried out a hasty impeachment — two days — that charged Trump with the wrong crime. Convicting Donald Trump of “incitement” to insurrection will debase both the crime of incitement — which our courts have long read narrowly to protect vital free-speech values — and the meaning of insurrection. We would not give the criminals and miscreants who attacked the Capitol the higher status of insurrectionists who had ideological goals in mind.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/20/now-the-washington-post-admits-trump-did-not-incite-the-capitol-riot-n1398722

With the second bogus impeachment in the books, the Washington Post has finally seen fit to admit that President Trump did not incite the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 with his speech, acknowledging that it was, in fact, planned in advance.

The article, published Tuesday, the day before Biden’s inauguration, declares in its headline “Self-styled militia members planned on storming the U.S. Capitol days in advance of Jan. 6 attack, court documents say” and opens with the following paragraphs.

Self-styled militia members from Virginia, Ohio and other states made plans to storm the U.S. Capitol days in advance of the Jan. 6 attack, and then communicated in real time as they breached the building on opposite sides and talked about hunting for lawmakers, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

While authorities have charged more than 100 individuals in the riot, details in the new allegations against three U.S. military veterans offer a disturbing look at what they allegedly said to one another before, during and after the attack — statements that indicate a degree of preparation and determination to rush deep into the halls and tunnels of Congress to make “citizens’ arrests” of elected officials.

U.S. authorities charged an apparent leader of the Oath Keepers extremist group, Thomas Edward Caldwell, 66, of Berryville, Va., in the attack, alleging that the Navy veteran helped organize a ring of dozens who coordinated their movements as they “stormed the castle” to disrupt the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.

Several paragraphs later, here’s what the authors of the article concede:

The arrests this weekend of several people with alleged ties to far-right extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, suggest that the riot was not an entirely impulsive outburst of violence but an event instigated or exploited by organized groups. Hours of video posted on social media and pored over by investigators have focused on individuals in military-style gear moving together.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/20/the-1861-project/

Blind to age and deaf to the age we live in, Joe Biden on Wednesday spoke like a politician of a previous age. He used allusions and direct quotations to perform an illusion. But his performance was too old, his movements too obvious, his hands—his rhetorical sleight of hand—too overt to succeed. 

Biden’s inaugural performance failed because the performer failed to see that an illusion must be believable, that to play the part one must look the part, that the part is historic, not a historical reenactment. The performance failed because it was an act of procedure with bad acting; it was a repetition of words read to Mr. Biden, followed by an even worse speech by Biden.

Facts made the performance unbearable, because reality—the plain, visible reality of a multiracial assembly of former presidents and first ladies, of Barack and Michelle Obama alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton and George W. and Laura Bush—made the rhetoric unbelievable. 

The fact that Kamala Harris is not only our first female vice president but also the first Democratic vice president who is a person of color, the fact that her charge of “systemic racism” would make it impossible for her to discharge the duties of her office because she would not be eligible to vote or serve in public office if it were true, the fact that systemic racism would require the interposition and nullification of the 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution: these facts do not matter.

What matters to the faithful is the inerrancy of scripture, not contradictions in a bible with no text. How else to explain faith in a “living Constitution” and belief in the existence of eternal injustice toward nonwhites? How else to explain faith in the mastery of certain words and belief in the freedom to choose what a word means? How else to explain trespass as treason and unlawful entry in the Capitol as a capital offense?

What matters is power.