It would be conservative to convict Trump
15th February 2021 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist
First it was Rep. Liz Cheney and now Louisiana’s own Sen. Bill Cassidy.
Noted national conservative columnist (and New Orleans native) Quin Hillyer very correctly observes the danger in the attempt to strip the Wyoming congresswoman of her leadership role, just because she voted to impeach Donald Trump: “I usually try to be magnanimous. This is not a time for magnanimity. The House Conference vote on Liz Cheney was a battle for the soul of the party and the country. The Jacobins lost. Reason prevailed. And those who shot at the queen may rue the day they did. As well they should.”
Liz Cheney holds an almost perfect American Conservative Union record, which was until very recently the definition of ideological purity in the GOP. She votes in line with the Republican Party core values on pretty much every major issue. It’s just that she happens to think that what Donald Trump did on January 6 was an impeachable offense. She voted for that measure whilst Trump was still in office, so that the recent Constitutional appropriateness arguments do not apply.
As Hillyer personally has explained to this columnist, “There is no way in hell that the vote to impeach was unconstitutional. Not even close. One can make an argument that a Senate vote after he leaves office is unconstitutional. One would be wrong, but at least it is within arguable reason. But to vote to impeach, while [Trump] was still in office, is 100 percent constitutional. To say otherwise is absurd to the point of insanity.”
After all, the last time impeachment was employed against a former office holder was by a Republican Congress after William Belknap, the Secretary of War, resigned his post in 1876. In other words, Congresswoman Cheney did nothing that betrays the conservative movement or the GOP. (In point of fact, as such a high ranking official in the party voting for impeachment, she may have provided the Republican Party with some political cover with suburban women who have turned away from the GOP because of Trump.) Nevertheless, the Wyoming GOP voted to censure Cheney.
Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator likewise was labeled a virtual “traitor” by the LAGOP, amongst others fearful of the nativist mob, for daring to say that the impeachment may be constitutional (and that Trump’s defense team provided little defense for the former president on the first day of the trial). Bill Cassidy too was later pensively silent when it became clear from Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville that Trump sent a tweet blaming Pence – after being apprised of a danger to the vice president‘s life.
As Hillyer wrote in the Washington Examiner shortly after, “Tommy Tuberville provides the final, necessary piece of evidence for the Senate to find Donald Trump guilty of an impeachable offense… As the entire impeachment case developed, the key question always has been whether Trump did not merely encourage ordinary protests but instead knowingly encouraged the thugs who invaded the Capitol.”
Hillyer noted, “The one piece of concrete evidence we have of [Trump’s] state of mind was his tweet at 2:24 EST in which he accused former Vice President Mike Pence by name of lacking ‘courage.’ What we didn’t previously know is if that was before or after Trump knew the Capitol had been breached and that the vice president, whom Trump had castigated numerous times that day, was in danger…Because of what Tuberville told reporters [on Wednesday], now we know. Trump, intending to call Tuberville to ask him to delay the vote count further, called the phone of Utah Republican Mike Lee instead. We know this was in the first 15 minutes after 2 p.m. Lee gave the phone to Tuberville.”
Tuberville said, “Mr. President, they just took the vice president out. I’ve got to go.”
Hillyer continues, “So, around 2:15, Tuberville told Trump that security forces had whisked Pence away from the chamber. By 2:20, all members of Congress were being removed from both chambers. Four minutes after that, nine minutes after Trump’s call with Tuberville, Trump tweeted his new attack on Pence. Pence and his family were still in the building. Two minutes after Trump’s tweet, security evacuated the Vice President entirely – less than a single minute before the mob reached the room where the Pences had been held.”
“Whether watching on TV as the entire Senate was evacuated, as numerous third-hand reports say Trump was doing, or because of his phone call with Tuberville, the president absolutely knew by the time of his anti-Pence tweet that the Capitol, which had by then been under assault for more than an hour, was being not just attacked but overrun. Even after that, Trump refused entreaties from House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to condemn the rioters and tell them to desist… Trump knew then Pence was in danger, but he kept inciting the mob against his own loyal lieutenant. The mob came within a minute of reaching its target. Trump should be convicted, forthwith.”
This conclusion comes from one of the stars of the conservative intelligencia, whom only a fool would call a RINO. No one who holds that defense of the constitutional order is the basis of all conservatism deserves the epithet of “A Republican in Name Only.”
We Republicans have to come to terms with the fact that our party made a Faustian bargain in embracing Trump. Yes, conservatives solidified a Supreme Court majority, cut taxes and regulation, and achieved some pro-life priorities. But until Trump, we were the adults in the room. Republicans stood as the defenders of the constitutional social fabric. We held true to the Burkean notion of tradition and ordered liberty.
Suddenly the Republican base has morphed into a gaggle of Robespierres. And that never ends well. Thank God for Liz Cheney and Bill Cassidy and their small handful of peers. If only our own state republican party showed the same integrity.
As a LAGOP press release read last week, “The Republican Party of Louisiana is profoundly disappointed by Senator Bill Cassidy’s vote on the constitutionality of the impeachment trial now underway against former President, now private citizen, Donald J. Trump. We feel that an impeachment trial of a private citizen is not only an unconstitutional act, but also an attack on the very foundation of American democracy, which will have far reaching and unforeseen consequences for our republic. We also remind all Americans that former President Trump is innocent of the politically motivated, bogus charges now pending against him in a kangaroo court presided over by an openly hostile political opponent.”
No wonder that more than 120 former elected Republicans, GOP officials from the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations, ex-ambassadors and Republican strategists, held a Zoom call a week ago to discuss the formation of a center-right anti-Trump third party. As fellow conservative commentator Erick Erickson put it, “If the GOP found out Joe Biden pardoned someone and Hunter Biden got a mass pile of cash from that person in the last week of Biden’s presidency, you’re damn right they’d impeach and have a trial even if it couldn’t conclude before Jan 20. That Republican senators are hiding behind a constitutional argument is the only way they can justify getting through this because Trump can be impeached and convicted and yes he did provoke what happened.”
Christopher Tidmore co-hosts “The Founders Show: The Insider’s View of La. Politics,” every Sunday 8-9 am on WRNO 99.5FM and Monday, Wednesday & Friday 8-9 am on WSLA 93.9FM/1560AM. Archived at www.thefoundersshow.com. He is both a lifelong Republican and has served The Louisiana Weekly as an editor & columnist for more than two decades.
This article originally published in the February 15, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
