Impeachment and the (Idiot) Media

I continue to be quite upset at the way the idiot media continues to rant and rave about why the House Managers did not call witnesses. You may think "Idiot" is too strong a term, but bear in mind these are national correspondents we're talking abut, people who are at the top of their profession. They should know better.

All witnesses would have accomplished would be to delay the trial for weeks or even months. You would have to decide who to subpoena, then schedule depositions for those witnesses who were willing to honor their subpoenas, and then risk the danger that the witnesses would refuse to testify as expected. (Note how vociferously Senator Mike Lee was in objecting to statements he reportedly made. Others could have done the same.)

The way these things can get tied up in the courts is illustrated by the House Judiciary Committee's attempts to subpoena former White House Counsel Don McGahn. The Committee has been trying for two years to enforce its subpoena, and it is STILL tied up in the courts. Had the House Managers gone ahead with attempting to bring in witnesses, it would have turned the whole thing into a circus, and perhaps they would have even lost some of the seven Republican votes that they got. I really liked the way they methodically presented the case, and didn't use all of the16 allotted hours. Witnesses would not have accomplished a damn thing, other than pissing off the Senators.

Another thing the idiot media kept doing was referring to the Senators as "jurors". I would have thought this issue was settled during the most dramatic moment of the Clinton impeachment trial, when Senator Tom Harkin objected to the House Managers repeatedly referring to the Senators as jurors. Chief Justice Rehnquist ruled that he agreed with Harkin. The point here is that impeachment is a political process, not a legal process, and nowhere in the Constitution are the Senators referred to as "jurors".

The media made much of the fact that several GOP Senators were meeting with Trump's lawyers, as though there was something horribly wrong with this. Again, the attempt is being made to compare this to a judicial trial. What we ended up seeing in the question and answer period is that there was coordination in both camps with the Senators. It was obvious that the questions were submitted in advance. I was looking forward to the type of colloquies that we see in a Supreme Court oral argument, where the Justices press the attorneys for the side they disagree with. But here, questions were mostly friendly ones, where a Democratic Senator would submit ones to the House Managers, and GOP Senators to Trump's attorneys. The fact that many of the answers were written out and read demonstrates this.

"Abraham Lincoln's Execution", by John Chandler Griffin

The central thesis of this book is that Lincoln's execution was planned by Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. I'm somewhat dubious about the mostly circumstantial evidence of this conspiracy theory, so I'd like to focus on the more interesting parts of this remarkable book.

What is clear is that John Wilkes Booth did not die as the history books allege, but rather he lived under assumed names in various places in the South until January 13, 1903, when he died by suicide in Enid, Oklahoma. Those who knew Booth andf saw the body all said that the red hair of the body killed in 1865 showed that it was not Booth. Those who killed this person were out to claim a substantial reward, so had every reason to claim it was Booth. In 1994 an effort was made to exhume the body so that DNA testing could settle the matter. Booth's next of kin were in favor, but a judge ruled against this effort.

The Mary Surratt debacle is especially tragic. The military commission in charge of the court-martial initially voted against hanging her. Stanton was outraged, and pressured the commission to impose the death penalty. They then reached a compromise wherein they would vote for death, but then present a petition asking President Johnson to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. Johnson never acted on the petition, and there is some question about whether Stanton ever actually presented the petition to Johnson.

The saga of Mary's son, John Surratt, is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. He was in Canada at the time of the execution of Lincoln, and remained there with a series of Confederate sympathizers for several months. On Oct. 25, 1865, the State Dept. was informed that John was planning to go to Rome. Rather than aggressively pursuing him, the State Dept. rescinded the reward offer, and allowed him to remain free for a over a year. Eventually he was captured and brought back to the U.S., where he stood trial in a civilian court, the Supreme Court having prohibited a military court. He received a vigorous defense, and the jury hung 8-4 for acquittal, When he was retried, the government dropped the murder charge, and his counsel pointed out that the statute of limitations had expired on the lesser charges, so the judge had to dismiss the case.