Pelosi uses President’s day message to Democratic colleagues to announce independent commission to investigate the Capitol insurrection …
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TPM Reader JG, a law professor, adds this dissent to my comments below …

I think your take on “Dems cave on witnesses” is simply wrong. The managers said they wanted one witness — a one hour deposition of Herrera Beutler. They leaked the fact that no one around Trump or Pence with direct knowledge of Trump’s actions would agree to testify. So with the stipulation that admitted H-B’s statement into the impeachment record, they have an evidentiary basis to argue that Trump fomented insurrection after the fact as well. If they had more witnesses they would have wanted their testimony! I don’t think it has much to do with the threat to call Pelosi, etc. I think the only objection to their strategy is that with more time — a delay to depose H-B, etc., more folks with knowledge would have agreed to come forward. Also not unlikely: McCarthy could come under pressure to dispute H-B (her testimony is hearsay, after all) and could have put in a counter-affidavit disavowing the truth of what she said. So net: the managers’ added to their case. The externals may look messy but it’s up to folks like you to focus on the bottom line.

Senate Democrats decision to forego witnesses earlier this afternoon came as a jolt, inexplicable and maddening, to many or most Democrats outside the chamber because Democrats appeared to hold all the cards and all the votes and yet capitulated entirely. The final decision was simply to enter Rep. Herrera Beutler’s statement into the record and move on.

Before getting to what this means let me be candid and tell you that through most of this trial and what led up to it I’ve been ambivalent about calling witnesses. In the abstract of course you should call witnesses. But we’re not living in the abstract. The national interest and the Democrats’ partisan interests rests overwhelmingly on rapidly passing a bold COVID relief bill to end the Pandemic and resurrect the economy.

That is not needed simply in the direct sense of getting shots in arms and dollars in hands. Coming out of the moral and civic catastrophe of the last four years it is critical to vindicate the idea that people’s votes, their electoral exertions can and will translate into tangible benefits in their lives. This is a Newtonian cause and effect with which civic life withers and dies or gives way to obscurantism and authoritarian temptation.

To the extent witnesses or an extended trial delayed that to more than a trivial degree, just push through the trial and get on to repairing the country. This is all the more the case since the chances of conviction are as infinitesimally small as the scope of the evidence is vast.

From the closing argument of impeachment manager Madeleine Dean (D-PA):

For those who say we need to get past this, we need to come together, we need to unify, if we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past. The past will become our future.

Correction: I initially misidentified Dean.

Well, that didn’t last long.

Dems seemed to have seized the advantage, backed by five GOP senators, to present at least some witnesses in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The fierce reaction of GOP senators to what House impeachment managers and Dem senators wanted to do testified to the the advantage Dems had taken hold of.

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Very surprising, very dramatic events just in the last half hour of the impeachment trial. The Senate has voted to call witnesses, something that seemed all but ruled out just last night. The trial was supposed to end today with a vote to acquit. The shift was triggered by the revelations of Rep. Herrera Beutler (R) of Washington who heard from Rep. Kevin McCarthy of an exchange the day of the insurrection in which President Trump defended the insurrectionists to McCarthy when McCarthy called Trump begging him to call off the mob.

Big unexpected news this morning as the Senate has voted 55-45, with five Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, to consider witnesses subpoenas. This was on the heels of last night’s CNN report that put into sharper focus the phone call between President Trump and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) during the Capitol siege.

Even though the last two days of the impeachment trial have included new information about the fact that former President Trump put his veep in harms way, Vice President Mike Pence is standing by his man.

At least five people died during the events of January 6th on Capitol Hill. More than 100 Capitol Police officers were injured, at least 15 of whom required hospitalization. Two Capitol Police officers took their own lives in the days immediately following the assault, presumably spurred by trauma and/or guilt over the insurrection. But the death of Officer Brian Sicknick has loomed over the events of the January 6th like no other. While others were bludgeoned or attacked and could have died of their injuries the fact that Sicknick did die added a gravity to the events of January 6th it would not, for better or worse, otherwise have had.

Because of this, a new ‘truth movement’ has begun to crop up on the right suggesting Sicknick’s death was unrelated to the insurrection and may even be part of a cover-up to tarnish the reputation of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s ugly and utterly predictable.

We just started the second day of House impeachment managers’ arguments as they seek to persuade a jury of senators to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection. All eyes, of course, are on the Republicans in the chamber.