A Big Day

It's only unanticipated if you've had your head in the sand for the past six months.

The schedule laid out by McConnell would consign key proceedings to late, potentially post-midnight hours and left in doubt whether the Senate would admit evidence gathered in the House – much less call any witnesses to testify about Trump’s conduct.

Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, called the resolution “a national disgrace”.

  Guardian

Really. How many people were going to watch anyway? MAGAheads will just wait for Sean Hannity and Trump's tweets to tell them what happened each day and everybody else will watch video clips from their favorite news source.

Cocooned by the fidelity of a Republican party intolerant of the least criticism of their leader, even as the trial begins Trump appeared to be safe in his post. A two-thirds majority of members present in the Republican-controlled Senate would be required to remove him.

But the Senate trial may hold hidden pitfalls for Trump, including some that could be beyond the power of his sworn allies in the Senate leadership to prevent.

To make their case, Democrats will seek to call witnesses who might change the way the public perceives Trump’s alleged scheme to wield the unique powers of his office for his own political advantage.

But under the McConnell rules, potential witnesses would need to be deposed before testifying at the trial, and individual Senate votes would be required to call the witnesses. It appeared that McConnell had enough votes from his caucus to push the rules package through as soon as the trial convenes on Tuesday afternoon.

Mitch McConnell is hell bent on destroying the Republic.

Presiding at the trial will be John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, who is expected to rule with a light touch but who will have the power to admit evidence or testimony that Trump might prefer omitted.

No he won't. He can permit it, but the Republicans have veto power even over the Chief Justice, which is a Constitutional rule I don't understand. Why even bother with a Chief Justice - who is supposed to be apolitical - if he doesn't get the final say?

[Trump's legal brief] attacked the Democrats’ case on constitutional grounds, arguing that the impeachment was invalid because Trump had not been accused of violating a particular law.

But that interpretation of the constitution was unrecognizable to constitutional law experts, many of whom expressed public dismay at what they called the reckless language of the document.

“Their argument is wrong, particularly when they contend that ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ requires proof of an indictable crime,” Frank O Bowman III, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law and an impeachment expert, told the Guardian in an email.

He continued: “Not true. Never has been, either in England or the US. To argue otherwise, they cherry-pick their sources and ignore the massive body of contrary evidence.”

Welcome to the Republican Party.

In a July 2019 phone call in which Trump reminded the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that “the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine” and then asked for “a favor”, Trump was motivated by a desire to stamp out internal Ukrainian corruption, the document argued.

“It’s like Presidential tweets reformatted to look like a legal document,” tweeted Orin Kerr, a prominent scholar of constitutional law and law professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

[...]

But as he prepared to depart for Switzerland, Trump got well out ahead of his lawyers on Twitter, in a pattern that could repeat itself during the trial, which is expected to last at least two weeks and could run for much longer.

Not "could". It will. His lawyers will not be able to shut him down. That's why they've had to resort to the defense that he can do whatever he wants and none of it is impeachable.

“They didn’t want John Bolton and others in the House,” Trump tweeted, referring to his former national security adviser, who could recount direct conversations with the president about Ukraine, in testimony that could be damaging.

“No, Mr. President, we did ask John Bolton to testify,” Schiff replied on Twitter. “You ordered him not to, and blocked others, like [acting chief of staff] Mick Mulvaney.

The public trial will take place on twitter.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.