WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Monday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes:
• The few in the U.S. Senate chamber to hear Donald J. Trump be indicted at the end of the day were warned to be quiet while the charge was read -under pain of imprisonment. The solemn beginning of a process triggered only three times before in America and employed in three dozen other countries going back several hundred years will leave the U.S. changed forever, conviction or acquittal.
• The jurors, the 100 senators, many eyewitnesses to the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, are split at least three ways with few undecided even two weeks before the trial. Democrats are assumed to be unanimously in favor of conviction. They know Trump is quietly golfing, anticipating a new career on the airwaves of Fox, the One America News Network and Newsmax, continuing to claim his victory was stolen. Some Republican senators who don’t face the possibility of primary campaigns and others who don’t care, are ready to convict, possibly including Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. The rest, the majority of Republicans, for one professed reason or another, see no other choice than to acquit.
• Some legal giants, like Lawrence Tribe, say a vote to acquit will amount to a conviction of the Senate as an institution, unable to act on undeniable evidence, unable to protect the country from what can come next. Others who have read the history that pertains to the decision ahead of them know how crippling an endorsement – into which acquittal will be translated – can be to efforts to weld a fractured nation back together. There have been other Trumps, back to Caesar. Systems of government have been mortally wounded by internal ruptures.
• Acquittal, however, is the overwhelmingly probable outcome. Is it fair to describe Trump as a fledgling autocrat? It is fair to overlook everything he brought to the presidency? Everything? Is it fair for any news media, whose practice and privileges are bound up with democracy, to take sides? Is the evolution toward an ever better country to be interrupted or derailed because the fledgling autocrat has already made so much progress in controlling and intimidating so many of his jurors? Perhaps then, the interruption, the derailment, is already too far gone.
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Contact this writer: denny@macenews.com.
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