By Miriam Raftery

December 18, 2019 – The House prepares to vote today on impeaching President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  If impeachment passes the House, the Senate must hold a trial and set the rules. 

But  Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who is in charge of setting rules for a Senate trial, has brazenly stated, “I’m not an impartial juror.” That violates the U.S. Constitution, which requires that Senators must take an oath pledging to act as an "impartial justice" before engaging in an impeachment trial. McConnell has further stated that he is "in total coordination with the White House counsel's office" and is "taking my cues from the president's lawyers."

Journalists, whose obligation is to report truth and provide readers with facts instead of propaganda, have taken a far different view.  Dozens of  major newspapers including virtually all of the nation’s top newspapers have published editorials calling for impeachment--including such respected national news sources as USA Today, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, the conservative-leaning Salt Lake City Tribune and Houston Chronicle, and newspapers spanning the nation geographically including the San Diego Union-Tribune, Denver Post, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun-Times, Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Portland Oregonian, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, Connecticut Post, the Atlantic, San Jose Mercury News, York Dispatch in Pennsylvania, and the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

USA Today’s editorial board wrote, “In his thuggish effort to trade American arms for foreign dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump resembles not so much Clinton as he does Richard Nixon, another corrupt president who tried to cheat his way to reelection. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. It is precisely the type of misconduct the framers had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton supported a robust presidency but worried about “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper” coming to power. Impeachment, Hamilton wrote, was a mechanism to protect the nation “from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”