The NPR Politics Podcast - What We Know About The Senate Impeachment Trial

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Today the House will formally deliver an article of impeachment against former President Trump to the Senate, and the upper chamber has already begun to work out the parameters for the coming trial. Even though it may be for different reasons, Republicans and Democrats both want it to happen as fast as possible. Plus, President Biden continues signing an unprecedented number of executive orders, many targeted at reversing Trump era orders.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and congressional correspondent Susan Davis.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jennifer Moran-Sillers. I just completed a long day at our immunization clinic in Hammond, Louisiana, giving the COVID-19 vaccine to over 300-plus very grateful senior citizens. This podcast was recorded at... I feel like I should say thank you 300 times for doing that. That is just so awesome. It is at 206 Eastern on Monday, January 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. I love a vaccine timestamp.

Give us more. Give us more. All the vaccine timestamps. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. So today, later today, the House of Representatives will deliver to the Senate an article of impeachment against former President Trump. Trump was the first president to be impeached twice. Now he will be the first to be tried in the Senate after leaving office. Sue, a lot of details have started falling into place over the last few days when it comes to how this trial is going to look, when it is going to start.

What do we know about that? The Senate leaders on Friday reached loose terms for an agreement that the trial won't start right away. This is very typical. Normally in an impeachment process for a president, they give written notice to the president that he's been impeached. They give them time to respond to the Congress and also to form a defense team in his defense. So there's going to be about a two-week lag, and then they expect that the trial will begin in earnest with opening presentations the week of February 8th. Most people I've talked to say they don't anticipate a long trial. Jamie Raskin, who's the lead impeachment manager in the House, he's a Democrat from Maryland, said he also expected a swift trial. If you compare it to the first Trump impeachment, that one lasted about three weeks. And I haven't

talked to anyone who thinks it's going to take longer than that right now. When you say fast, are we talking days? Are we talking a week? Do we have any idea? I think most people expect a week or two. You know, things are just slow in the Senate, and you have to give the defense team in particular time to respond. And there are usually hour time limits and all these kind of things. So if everybody run out the clock, it could take a little bit longer. But the sense is, you know, from Democrats and Republicans alike is that they want a swift trial. They may want them for different reasons. But I haven't heard anyone make the case that this should be a long, drawn out process with lots of witnesses and should go for, you know,

weeks and weeks and weeks. Tam, one of the many strange things about the second impeachment is how fast it all happened for a variety of reasons, including the fact that President Trump was on his way out the door when this insurrection happened. He and his team did not really have much to say the day that he was impeached by the House of Representatives. Do we have a sense yet what his trial defense is going to look like in terms of people or the message that they're going to be giving? We don't know a lot yet. We know that a lawyer named Bush Bowers is going to be representing him. He's from South Carolina, and he has experience with ethics-related cases.

We also know that South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has at least publicly been doing a lot of messaging for the president on this, arguing that impeaching someone who's out of office isn't constitutional. And I think that is likely going to be one of the arguments, is he's gone already. What's the point?

In terms of the rest of his legal team, I mean, he is a former president. He does not have a White House counsel's office anymore. And so there's no automatic team. And I do know that Jay Sekulow, one of the lawyers who represented him in the impeachment trial the first time, who was a key part of his impeachment defense, he is not going to be part of this defense, I've been told. Sue, can you remind us what the point is of this Senate trial, given the fact that impeachment is largely about removal from office? And as we all know, Donald Trump's been out of office since Wednesday. What are the goals here? What are the implications here for Trump? And what is the

thinking on this constitutional argument we're starting to hear that this whole thing could be moot? This is tricky. There's no precedent for this. We've never had a Senate impeachment trial for a former president. So they're kind of writing the rules as they go. The overwhelming sentiment in the Democratic Party was that they could not let the events of January 6th come and go without Congress responding to the president and to the events of that day. And as we saw in the House impeachment vote, there is overwhelming unity in the Democratic Party that the president's actions were worthy of impeachment and a small handful of Republicans too. You know, the Senate's trial is going to happen because they don't have a choice, right? There's the constitutional process is that

once the House informs the Senate, they have to have a trial. And remember, once it starts, once it starts in earnest, they're in those seats six days a week, except for Sundays. The trial starts at one o'clock every day, and they have to go until they either acquit or convict, and they can't, unless they reach agreement, do any other business. So, you know, Democrats have been a little quietly gnashing their teeth about this because it does run the risk of stepping on Joe Biden's, you know, early days and their agenda. I mean, as we all know, when Trump is driving the news, it sucks up all the other oxygen. And there's been some, you know, political consternation that if you keep Trump the focus of our political debate, what good does that do? But I don't think Senate Democrats think

that there's an overall disadvantage here. I think they want to take this vote. And frankly, there's a lot of Republicans who don't want to take this vote. There's been more criticism from Republicans of the president's actions in the Senate. But this is still a really hard vote. I mean, Trump is still overwhelmingly popular in the party. And we've seen from the House Republicans that voted for impeachment in the House, they've already seen a huge amount of pushback from their donors, from their constituents, from primary threats, like this is just not going to be a politically easy vote, even if we still seem pretty confident that they're not going to have the votes they need to convict. There's another thing, if they vote to convict, they could also then vote to prevent him from running for office ever, ever again, which has its appeal, certainly to Democrats, but probably to some Republicans, too. way that Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Minority Leader, the way that he is approaching this differently compared to a year ago when he was the Senate Majority Leader during the first

impeachment trial. Yeah, I don't know if you guys remember, but in the first impeachment trial, McConnell at one point was asked, how can you be an impartial juror? And he said, I'm not an impartial juror. I don't see myself as an impartial juror. And he used the Majority Leader office and his alignment with the White House to try to help them and orchestrate the trial and how it would go and represent their interests and sort of how they set up the terms of the trial. He's not really doing any of that this time around. If anything, McConnell has been publicly very critical of the president on the floor of the Senate. He has essentially told Republicans he sees this as a vote of conscience, like he's not going to be whipping this vote and telling people what they need to do or should do. And he's even sort of cracked this

door to the possibility that he himself could be a vote to convict. Now, I think there's good reason to be skeptical about that. But the fact that McConnell himself and his orbit have sort of said they want to hear all the evidence before they make up their mind is a dramatic shift, even though in a very McConnell way. He doesn't actually ever use dramatic words. But he's not giving the president any backup in the Senate right now. And I think that's been a difficult position for some Senate Republicans who look to Mitch McConnell sort of be like, hey, what are we doing here? What's the long term play? What's the strategy? And you can read from that an element that McConnell's just tired of Trump, and he would like the party to move on from this president.

He might not have the power himself to do it, but he'd like it to happen. Sue, I know you called him the president. He is the ex-president. And that may have something to do with McConnell's willingness to keep him at arm's length because there's nothing Trump can do for him right now. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, President Biden continues to roll out executive orders, including an order today revoking the Trump era ban on transgender service in the military. We are still in the middle of this pandemic. And right now, having science news you can trust from variants to vaccines is essential. NPR Shortwave has your back. About 10 minutes every weekday, listen and subscribe to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. So today, President Biden signed another in a long list of executive orders. This time,

he repealed former President Trump's ban on transgender people serving in the military. This had been an especially notable early example, Tam, of President Trump being not only divisive, but also kind of disorganized. Like this was one of those EOs that sent shockwaves, but just appeared on the Twitter feed and the Pentagon was taken aback by it. That's right. He tweeted that he was doing this ban on transgender people serving in the military. And then the military found out. And then it actually, it was one of those things where it took a while for the policy to catch up with the tweets. And ultimately, he did do executive action that backed it up. And then after some delays and

legal fights, it went through. And now Biden is once again signaling that he is not Donald Trump and keeping his promises and reversing it. Yeah. And this is something that Biden had talked a lot about on the campaign trail. A lot of a lot of groups were very happy to see. They thought that the initial EO was just simply discriminatory and had no other reason for being put into place. One interesting thing from the, they just released the text of the executive order. It seems like there's language that would reinstate or correct the record of anybody who was dismissed from the military for their gender identity over the last few years. This is just one in a long series of executive orders that have been coming out every single day for the first week and then some of Biden's presidency. What's the goal here? What is he trying to show and accomplish?

Well, let's just put some perspective on this. When President Trump issued 14 executive actions in the first week, that was a record. And Joe Biden is on track. I mean, he's already done it. He has doubled that and he's still going in his first week. So it is off the charts, the number of actions that he's doing. Part of this is simply reversing what President Trump did over the course of his presidency. And part of this is possible because President Trump did so much by executive action rather than by working with Congress. Sue, is there any response from the House or Senate on the amount of orders coming out? This is something that Biden spent a lot of time talking about when he was running for president. So it's not exactly a surprise, but still, as Tam mentioned, it's a lot.

You know, these executive orders are one of those things that expose sort of hypocrisy in politics. And we haven't heard a lot of pushback on the Hill, but I think it's because neither party can kind of claim the ground here to criticize a president for executive order use in that, you know, Republicans are really critical of President Obama when he used executive orders to do things like immigration policy and any other number of policy changes. And then President Trump came in and embraced it just as equally, and Democrats were critical of his use of executive orders here. I think part of the bigger overarching governmental question here

is how much power Congress has ceded over the years to the executive branch because they don't have the ability to legislate. Part of the reason why things like executive orders on immigration are happening is because Congress continually has proven itself incapable of passing comprehensive immigration reform. So as long as Congress continues to be pretty, I don't want to say lazy, but unproductive or deadlocked on these big questions, it does push a lot of power down to, you know, the White House for the president to make these kind of sweeping policy changes that arguably are the kind of thing that should be done by Congress

and by law and not by sort of presidential order. Biden is trying to get a lot of big legislation passed, though. Top of mind is $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. Democrats, of course, control the House and the Senate, but by the tiniest of margins. Sue, there does not seem to be, as of yet, great overarching bipartisan enthusiasm for this spending bill, even though everyone is facing is that they just pushed another $900 billion out the door, right, like in the weeks before Biden became president. So there's a sense on Capitol Hill that is like, do we really need another $2 trillion right now? And a lot of the, you know, the provisions that he wants to continue, things like unemployment insurance and things like that, they're good until March, you March. They're not running up against a deadline. And y'all know Congress doesn't like to do anything unless they're up against an impending deadline. So there isn't a real rush to action. And there's some stuff in there that he probably just isn't going to be able

to get the support for. Like a $15 federal minimum wage is a pretty big ask. And there's a lot of resistance to it on Capitol Hill. So this is going to be difficult. And it's why Democrats are looking at sort of process workarounds, like using the budget reconciliation process or different kind of ways to get some element of it through, because they obviously want to win here. This is a big priority for the president. But it is not going to be easy and it's not going to come quick. All right, that is a wrap for today. All week, we are going to continue looking at President Biden's plans on things like climate and immigration. While the Senate moves closer to starting an impeachment trial, these next 100 days are going to be critical for the next four years. So be sure to tag along with us every single day on that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover

the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.