It was a great and triumphant evening for our Country. Thank you for all of the nice remarks and wonderful reviews of my State of the Union Speech. It was my great honor to have done it!

UPDATE VOA

US Senate Acquits Trump of 2 Articles of Impeachment

By Kenneth Schwartz,  Ken Bredemeier Updated February 05, 2020 07:30 PM

The U.S. Senate acquitted President Donald Trump of two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — concluding a nearly four-month effort by congressional Democrats to remove Trump from office.

During a solemn roll-call vote in the Senate chambers Wednesday afternoon with Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, the senators found Trump not guilty of abuse of power by a vote of 52 to 48, and not guilty of obstruction of Congress 53 to 47.

In a tweet, Trump called the acquittal, “our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!”

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

I will be making a public statement tomorrow at 12:00pm from the @WhiteHouse to discuss our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!186K3:07 PM – Feb 5, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy84K people are talking about this

The White House put out a statement saying Trump has been fully vindicated and exonerated. The statement calls for “retribution” against House Democratic leaders for lying and what it says was a manufactured case against the president.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who initiated the impeachment procedure in September, issued a bitter statement accusing the Senate of “normalizing lawlessness” and rejecting the system of checks and balances.

She called Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell a “rogue leader” who abandoned his duty to uphold the Constitution and protect the country from a “rogue president.”

The vote to acquit Trump of both charges brought by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives was strictly along party lines. The sole Republican dissension was Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who voted guilty on the abuse of power charge, but not guilty on obstructing Congress.

In a dramatic speech ahead of the vote, Romney said, “What the president did was wrong, egregiously wrong,” in asking Ukraine to launch an investigation of one of Trump’s chief 2020 Democratic challengers, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company.

“If these names were not the Bidens, the president would not have done what he did,” Romney said in a floor speech. “The president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust. … It was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

Romney acknowledged he would face fierce attacks from Trump’s allies, but said his conscience would not allow him to clear Trump of wrongdoing.

Before the vote, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made a last-ditch but fruitless effort to change Republican minds.

“You cannot be on the side of this president and be on the side of truth,” Schumer said, accusing the Senate’s Republican majority of sweeping Trump’s crimes under the rug. But he said ultimately” there is justice in this world, and truth and right will prevail.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made no mention of whether Trump actually committed a crime, saying whatever he did comes “nowhere near justifying the first presidential removal in history.”

He again accused Democrats of trying to rid the country of a president they simply do not like and looking to keep him from winning another term.

“We cannot let factional fever break our institutions,” McConnell told the senators.

The president made no mention of impeachment during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. But he has derided the process as a “witch hunt,” and said he did nothing wrong.

The articles of impeachment charged Trump with abusing his power by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch the Biden investigations while he withheld $391 million in military aid to Ukraine that Kyiv wanted to help fight pro-Russian separatists.

Trump released the assistance in September without Zelenskiy announcing any Biden investigations, which Republicans said was proof Trump had not engaged in a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine — the military aid in exchange for the politically tinged probes.

The second impeachment article accused Trump of obstructing congressional investigations into his Ukraine-related actions by directing key aides not to testify before impeachment investigators or provide documents.

Wednesday’ vote ends the two-week long impeachment trial. The verdict may exonerate Trump in the eyes of the Senate majority, the president’s Republican supporters in the House, and Trump backers across the country.

But Trump is running for reelection and as the campaign goes forward, he may find it impossible to put the matter behind him.

The country has yet to hear from former national security adviser John Bolton, who was willing to testify if the Senate had voted to allow witnesses. Bolton alleges in a yet-to-be-published book that Trump personally told him he was withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into the Bidens.

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said Trump will always be an impeached president who was charged with violating the Constitution, his oath of office, and using the presidency for his own personal political gain — labels that cannot be erased.

Moderate Republicans, independents and undecided voters will likely remember this in November, many Democrats say.

Trump’s impeachment trial was the third against a president in the country’s 243-year-old history with the same likely result, acquittal after a Senate trial. Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were both exonerated and remained in office to finish their terms.

More than four months after House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump‘s conduct, the Senate on Wednesday voted along near party lines to acquit the president of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. VOA Masood Farivar

The widely expected outcome likely will have far-reaching implications for the government and political system, many experts agree.

Here are five important  takeaways:

Unprecedented partisanship may have made it virtually impossible to remove future presidents from office

It never was going to be easy to impeach and convict a president. The U.S. Constitution sets a very high threshold for removing a misbehaving president from office — a majority vote of the House and a two-thirds vote of the Senate after conducting a trial. Only three American presidents — Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and now Trump — have been impeached, but none has been convicted.  

Yet  in the current period of deep national ideological and political divisions, it may have become all but impossible to oust a president.  As long as the president’s party stands by him and controls the Senate, critics say, he can feel safe from the threat of removal, no matter how egregious his conduct.

Party fidelity was on full display throughout the Trump impeachment.  Not a single Republican joined in the House vote to impeach the president.  The Senate acquittal vote was just as divided, with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah casting the lone Republican vote to convict Trump of abuse of office.

In the 1970s, when Congress considered impeaching Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal, the ideological divide between the two parties was nowhere near as rigid. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress.  Although Nixon ultimately resigned to avoid impeachment, six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee crossed party lines to recommend articles of impeachment.

The 2020 presidential election outcome may validate the wisdom of impeachment — or not

When Trump was impeached, some wondered if impeachment was going to become the new normal in American politics.  Republicans warned that the bar for presidential impeachments had been lowered to the point where Congress could impeach a president over mere policy disagreements.  

The jury is still out on whether the proceeding against Trump will usher in a new era of perpetual partisan impeachment.  A clue to how it plays out could come as early as the November U.S. presidential election, said Peter Shane, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University.   

If Trump wins re-election, it could likely blunt congressional appetite for impeachment, he said. On the other hand, a Democratic victory could vindicate the House Democrats’ pushing for impeachment.

“If it turns out that Democrats seem to do better in the fall because they’ve gone through this experience, maybe the lesson for future Houses of Representatives is, keep at it, even if you don’t get to remove the president,” Shane said.  

Trump’s acquittal raises the bar for abuse of power as an impeachable offense

The first of two articles of impeachment accused Trump of abuse of power in connection with his efforts to persuade the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

Republicans acquitted Trump of the charge because they believed the alleged abuse of power did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Critics say that’s likely to raise the bar for just how serious an abuse a president has to commit in order to face impeachment.

The balance of power has swung in favor of the executive branch

The constitutional principle of separation of powers was front and center during the impeachment trial.  Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine warned last  week that acquitting Trump of obstruction could shift the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch. “

It would be the largest transfer of power from Congress to the executive in the history of the country,” King warned.

Designed to prevent the concentration of power in any one branch of government, separation of powers is “the reason America is such a free country,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once famously said.  

During the Senate trial, much of the debate over the second article of impeachment — obstruction of Congress and its oversight — revolved around separation of powers.  While House impeachment prosecutors warned that acquitting the president of obstructing Congress would lead to an “imperial presidency,” the president’s lawyers insisted that it would undermine executive power.

The extent to which the acquittal will affect the balance of power between Congress and the executive is an open question.  In recent decades, the balance has swung in favor of the executive, as presidential powers on domestic and foreign affairs have steadily increased.

The acquittal “will certainly increase the temptation for future presidents to resist congressional oversight in the way that Trump has because he will, in a sense, have gotten away with it,” Shane said. “It may be that other presidents will feel that intermixing their personal goals with national security goals … is OK.”

In the long run, however, “what constrains this whole process is how the people in power think their political fortunes are going to be affected by the public at large,” Shane said.

A trial without witnesses may have set precedent

For the first time  in more than 200 years, the Senate conducted an impeachment trial without witnesses, despite a dogged Democratic push for testimony.  Deriding the break with tradition as a mockery of justice, Democrats warned it would set a dangerous precedent.  

Republicans countered that they, too, did not wish to set a precedent of sorts by calling witnesses that the House should have summoned in the first place.  A precedent has been nonetheless set, experts say, one that will likely influence how Congress in the future approaches impeachment proceedings.

Previous Post: U.S. Senate Seen Acquitting Trump In Vote Likely To Follow Strict Party Lines RFE

The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate appears set to acquit President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in a vote expected to follow party lines.

The February 5 vote in Washington follows a highly partisan State of the Union address by the president a day earlier, which further exposed the deep political divisions on Capitol Hill.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives impeached Trump in December for his alleged corruption in only the third such hearing against a president in the country’s history.

That vote set the stage for a Senate trial, where the two sides have clashed almost non-stop over the investigation and whether to allow new witnesses and evidence to be entered into the proceedings, a move the Republicans eventually defeated.

A two-thirds majority, or 67 of the Senate’s 100 seats, is needed to remove Trump from office. Republican members hold 53 of those seats, and none have come forward publicly to say they would support his ouster, unlike in 1974, when many Republicans abandoned President Richard Nixon during an impeachment probe, prompting him to resign before the procedure went any further.

Democrat President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House in 1999 for lying under oath and obstruction of justice over a sexual relationship with an intern at the White House, but he was acquitted by the Senate, which was controlled by his party.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the affair, which focused on whether the country’s 45th president withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine to force the eastern European country to announce an investigation into his political rival, Democrat Joe Biden, one of the frontrunners in the nomination race to face Trump in an election in November. Democrats also accused him of withholding a desired White House visit by Ukraine’s newly elected leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, until the Ukraine government made a public announcement of a probe.

Trump has called the impeachment process a “sham” and an “attempted coup.”