Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), one of the House impeachment managers, described the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump as a “dramatic success.”
Raskin said on Sunday that the second impeachment was the “ largest impeachment conviction vote in U.S. history,” coming after seven Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate to convict Trump in a 43-57 vote. During Trump’s first impeachment, only one Republican senator—Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah—convicted the then-commander-in-chief.
“It was by far the most bipartisan majority that’s ever assembled in the Senate to convict a president, which has traditionally been a kind of partisan thing in American history,” Raskin said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We got seven Republicans, and if you look at the ten Republicans in the House who joined us, it was by far the most bipartisan decision and a complete repudiation of the president’s conduct. Now, unfortunately, it didn’t reach the two-thirds majority in the Senate.”
Raskin, meanwhile, responded to a comment about not securing a conviction. The Senate requires 67 votes to convict a president.
“[W]e have no regrets at all. We left it totally out there on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and every senator knew exactly what happened,” he claimed.
Trump left office on Jan. 20, so impeachment could not be used to remove him from power. But Democrats said they hoped to secure a conviction to hold him responsible for the siege and set the stage for a vote to bar him from serving in public office again.
“This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country,” Trump said in a statement after his acquittal.
Other than Romney, Republican Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), Ben Sasse (Neb.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).
The House approved the single article of impeachment against Trump on Jan. 13, with 10 Republicans joining the chamber’s Democratic majority. That vote came a week after the Capitol was breached, interrupted the Joint Session of Congress, and clashed with an overwhelmed police force, according to law enforcement officials.
The defense lawyers accused Democrats not only of trying to silence Trump as a political opponent they feared facing in the future but of attempting to criminalize political speech with which they disagreed. The words Trump used, they argued, were no different than those regularly employed by Democrats.
Democrats frequently invoked Trump’s Jan. 6. comment to supporters to “fight like hell,” although they omitted the portion of his speech where he said protesters should “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard.
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