By now, the vote by Angus King to convict President Trump of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and remove him from office – and Susan Collins’ vote to acquit – have receded from the news, while coverage of the presidential race resumes, full tilt.
Years from now, though, Mainers will be reading about the words and actions of their two U.S. senators, and judging how well they responded to the pressures of an impeachment trial far more consequential than the one the acquitted Bill Clinton in 1999. The speeches they delivered on the Senate floor last Tuesday provide the first drafts.
King began with the due diligence he employed as an attorney, including “three legal pads of notes,” and mentioned that he’d returned to Maine to meet with constituents, including a packed forum in Brunswick; Collins had no public meetings.
King then turned to the historic nature of the occasion, saying he was asked, most frequently, “how we could proceed without witnesses and securing the documents that could confirm – or deny – the charges against the President.” He added, “For the first time in American history, we failed to so [and] this failure stains this institution.”
Collins did support witnesses, unavailingly, but in her speech presented a narrow brief, zeroing in on what she said were the procedural defects of the House managers’ presentation of the articles, which charged Trump with “abuse of power” by demanding foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election, and “obstruction of justice” by denying Congress access to documents and witnesses.
Collins also made an eyebrow-raising claim in contrasting the two impeachment trials in which she was a juror. She voted to acquit Clinton, even though “the House managers proved to my satisfaction that he did commit a crime.”
The “crime” alleged was lying under oath, during a deposition in a civil suit about sexual relations with a White House intern. The evidence was produced by the last Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr, following inquiries that had nothing to do with his inquiry’s original purpose. While sordid, the Clinton accusations had no bearing on the future of the nation, and its role in the world.
Trump, according to Collins, committed no crime. The charge that he pressured Ukraine to investigative a chief political rival by withholding congressional-approved assistance – illegally, according to the General Accounting Office – was, she said, “a difficult-to-define non-criminal act.”
If using foreign policy – in which presidents have become our sole, virtually unchecked actors – to attempt to win re-election is a “non-criminal act” it is only because those who write criminal statutes couldn’t imagine a president doing it. The Framers, however, did imagine such things, and offered impeachment as the remedy.
Collins’ points on the obstruction charges are equally narrow. She makes much of the delay in transmitting the articles, and ignores that her caucus leader, Mitch McConnell, said he would do Trump’s bidding and exercise no independent judgment – as the trial oath all senators took nonetheless requires.
King points out that the administration’s declaration that it “cannot participate” in impeachment inquires has no constitutional sanction. And its assertion that the courts should not intervene in the resulting dispute because impeachment is the remedy for such stonewalling only completes the circle of absurd reasoning.
Collins does mention George Washington in her conclusion, and says there are “good reasons” why a president has never been removed from office, because of its “traumatic and disruptive impact.” This makes an interesting contrast to the only time a president did leave office due to an impeachment inquiry, after which Richard Nixon’s successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, proclaimed that “our long national nightmare is over.”
Senator King was clearer in his conclusions, saying acquittal would mean that “this president will likely do it again, and future presidents will be unbound from any restraints on the use of the world’s most powerful political office for personal political gain. We are moving dangerously close to an elected monarch – the very thing the Framers feared most.”
King said that by enabling a president to defy Congress, not only about the Ukraine investigation, but on war powers, trade, and even “the power of the purse,” which “a supine Congress ceded to the president” over his attempt to build a border wall, his colleagues may have “enabled a new and unbounded presidency.” He summed up: “I sincerely hope that I am wrong in all this, but deeply fear that I am right.”
The question of who holds power in a democratic system, and how it is exercised, now proceeds to a different forum. Susan Collins, as well as Donald Trump, is on the ballot in November.
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, opinion writer and author for 35 years, has published books about George Mitchell, and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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