video and analysis.]
WASHINGTON When House impeachment managers prosecute former President Donald J. Trump this week for inciting the Capitol attack, they plan to mount a fast-paced, cinematic case aimed at rekindling the outrage lawmakers experienced on Jan. 6.
Armed with lessons from Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, which even Democrats complained was repetitive and sometimes sanctimonious, the prosecutors managing his second are prepared to conclude in as little as a week, forgo distracting witness fights and rely heavily on video, according to six people working on the case.
It would take 17 Republicans joining every Democrat to find Mr. Trump guilty, making conviction unlikely. But when the trial opens on Tuesday at the very scene of the invasion, the prosecutors will try to force senators who lived through the deadly rampage as they met to formalize President Biden’s election victory to reckon with the totality of Mr. Trump’s monthslong drive to overturn the ele
The House managers cited the Constitution’s framers in urging that Donald J. Trump be convicted and disqualified from holding office. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the Senate had no jurisdiction.
All but five Republican senators voted to challenge the constitutionality of the trial, suggesting that Democrats were unlikely to find the 17 they would need to join them in convicting the former president.
House managers presented the Senate with an article charging Donald J. Trump with “incitement of insurrection.” But Republicans are increasingly indicating they are unlikely to find him guilty.
Democrats must kill the filibuster and make the Senate great again.
By Adam Jentleson
Mr. Jentleson is the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”
Jan. 20, 2021
Under Mitch McConnell as minority leader, Senate Republicans used the filibuster to block President Barack Obama’s agenda. Credit.Damon Winter/The New York Times
Bumping Senator Mitch McConnell to the minority increases Joe Biden’s odds of passing his agenda, but there is a catch.
In the Senate in recent decades, the filibuster has morphed from the long-winded speeches portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” into a silent but lethal tool that lets any one senator raise the threshold for passing bills from a simple majority (where the framers set it) to a supermajority of 60 votes.