The Daily - The Latest: ‘Let Us Begin’

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Opening arguments in the Senate impeachment trial are underway. For House impeachment managers, that means an opportunity to formally make their case, uninterrupted, for three straight days. For President Trump’s lawyers and Republican allies, that means three straight days of sitting in the Senate chamber, bound by a vow of silence.“The Latest” is a series on the impeachment process, from the team behind “The Daily.” You can find more information about it here.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. All persons are commanded to keep silent on pain of imprisonment. The Senate will receive the managers of the House of Representatives to exhibit the articles of impeachment against Donald John Trump, President of the United States. We have some very long days yet to come. So let us begin. very long days yet to come. So let us begin. Hey, it's Julie Davis in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. So today was the first big day in the impeachment trial in the Senate,

the first of three days in which representatives from the House, these are the impeachment managers, will deliver their opening arguments for a total of 24 hours straight. Ever since December, with the impeachment vote in the House, the focus has been on what the trial would actually look like in the Senate, what the process would be. Now it's actually happening. They are making their case. And this has kind of been the nightmare for President Trump, that Democrats would have unfettered, uncontested access to the spotlight and to the microphone to make their case against him. And it's well understood that he doesn't like to leave any attack without a counterpunch.

So what do you think? Will you show up at your trial any day? I'd love to go. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be beautiful? So why don't you go? I don't know. I'd sort of love to sit right in the front row and stare at their corrupt faces. I'd love to do it. I don't know. Don't keep talking because you may convince me to do it. You know, he was in Davos today at the World Economic Forum, but he was clearly paying close attention to this. And he did do his best to punch back in the ways that he could in that moment. It's 8.30 as I'm recording this, and he's already sent more tweets and retweets than any

other day of his presidency. Pursuant to the provisions of Senate Resolution 483, the managers for the House of Representatives have 24 hours to make the presentation of their case. The Senate will now hear you. But the latest is that, for everyone else but the president, today turned out to kind of just be something to get through. President Trump solicited foreign interference in our democratic elections, abusing the power of his office to seek help from abroad to improve his re-election prospects at home.

So Adam Schiff, who led the inquiry in the House, is now the lead manager, essentially the lead prosecutor. And when he was caught, he used the powers of that office to obstruct the investigation into his own misconduct. And he started the day with a two-and-a-half-hour opening statement, laying out the case by meticulously retelling the Democrats' narrative of what the president did. In this way, the president used official state powers available only to him and unavailable to any political opponent to advantage himself in a Democratic election. His scheme was undertaken for a simple but corrupt reason, to help him win re-election in 2020. So the main audience for this would seem to be the Republican senators in the room,

who are bound to silence, have to sit in their chairs saying nothing for the entirety of the proceeding. And pretty quickly it became clear that this was just kind of a pain in the butt for them to listen to this story again. They started to fidget. Some got up and walked around. Some left the Senate chamber. One of them fell asleep. At a certain point, Schiff actually kind of acknowledges the mood in the room.

While I pause to get a drink of water, let me let you know for your timing, I have about 10 minutes left in my presentation. So the end is in sight. The Democratic senators in the room, nobody's paying much attention to them. They're already on board. So the other main audience is the American public. If you've been paying close attention to the impeachment,

nothing you would have heard today would have been new. The framers had common sense and so must we. Are we to accept, well, the president said there was no quid pro quo, I guess that closes the case. And if you haven't been paying attention, you were probably kind of lost in the details. Obstruction of a separate and co-equal branch of government for the purposes of covering up an abuse of power not only implies a corrupt intent, but also demonstrates a remarkable antipathy towards the balance of power contemplated and enshrined in our Constitution. But what else could the Democrats have done on the first day of opening arguments?

The answer is not really much of anything. The reality here is that the power of the impeachment process is also its limitation. Once it begins, it can't be stopped. It's sort of like a conveyor belt in that way. It's moving forward at the speed it moves forward. And that's the way it works. And so today, they're in the phase where the Democrats have to lay out their case, which most people are already familiar with. That's where we're at on this conveyor belt. So yeah, that's the latest. Tomorrow, another full day of opening arguments in which the Democrats, again, cannot be interrupted.