During the portion of the impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump where Senators could ask questions, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) turned the topic to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking if she could also be impeached, convicted, and barred from holding future elected office.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the presiding officer over the trial, took Rubio’s question and instructed the clerk to read it out loud, noting that it was posed to both the House Impeachment Managers and Trump’s defense counsel.
Rubio’s question was as follows:
Voting to convict the former president would create a new precedent that a former official can be convicted and disqualified by the Senate. Therefore, is it not true that under this new precedent a future House facing partisan pressure to “lock her up” could impeach a former Secretary of State and a future Senate be forced to put her on trial and potentially disqualify from any future office?
“First of all, I don’t know how many times I can say it,” House Lead Impeachment Manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) responded first, arguing that the jurisdictional issues are “over” and “gone” — “The Senate settled it.”
Raskin then took some time to school fellow lawyer Rubio on the legal precedent, citing the Blunt and Belknap cases that both involved former officials, “and in this case we have a president who committed his crimes against the republic while he was in office. He was impeached by the House of Representatives while he was in office.”
In other words, said Raskin, Rubio’s hypothetical, clearly intended to invoke Clinton “has no bearing on this case because I don’t think you’re talking about an official who was impeached while they were in office for conduct that they committed while they were in office.”
Trump’s defense counsel, Michael van der Veen, then took his turn, arguing that the House Democrats’ argument would not just apply to remove a former Secretary of State, “but it could happen to a lot of people and that’s not the way this is supposed to work and not only could it happen to a lot of people, it would become much more regular, too.”
He also took part of his allotted two-and-a-half minutes to directly challenge the House impeachment managers, arguing that there were multiple reasons a senator could vote to acquit Trump, including jurisdictional, due process, failure to meet the burden to prove incitement.
“And so you have to look at what they have put on its totality and come to your own understanding as to whether you think they have met their burden to impeach, but the original question is an absolutely slippery slope that I don’t really think anybody here wants to send this country down,” van der Veen concluded.
Rubio repeated his argument on Twitter Friday evening, including a quickly-mocked typo, “slipper slope.”
*story by MEDIAite
