Second impeachment trial of Donald Trump

"He made them believe over many weeks that the election was stolen, and they were following his command to take back their country."

"I remember us finishing our task at four in the morning, and as I walked off the floor I was... so grateful for the opportunity to thank the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence for his actions, for standing before us and asking us to follow our oath, and our faith, and our duty."

"Early the next day I called my Dad, who came to this country... as an immigrant forty years ago, and I told him that the proudest moment, by far, of serving in Congress... was going back onto the floor with each of you, to finish the work that we had started."

"I'm humbled to be back with you today, and just as on January 6th when we overcame that attack on our Capitol, on our country, I'm hopeful that at this trial we can use our resolve and our resilience to again uphold our Democracy by faithfully applying the law, vindicating the Constitution, and holding president Trump accountable for his actions."

"The last time a body such as the United States Senate sat at the pinnacle of government with the responsibility that it has today was happening in Athens, and it was happening in Rome. Republicanism... the form of government... throughout history has always, and without exception, fallen because of fights from within, because of partisanship from within, because of bickering from within, and in each one of those examples... and there are certainly others, probably, that are smaller countries that lasted for less time... [O]nce there was the vacuum created that the greatest deliberative bodies, the senate of Greece.... and the senate of Rome, the moment that they devolved into such partisanship... It's not as though they ceased to exist. They ceased to exist as representative democracy. Both replaced by totalitarianism."

"Paraphrasing the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin... "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security deserves neither liberty nor security. If we restrict liberty to attain security, we will lose both." And isn't the way we have enshrined in the Constitution, the concepts of liberty that we think are critical, the very concepts of liberty that drove us to separate from Great Britain, and I can't believe these fellows are quoting what happened pre-revolutin as though that's somehow of value to us. We left the British system. If we're really ogoing to use pre-revolutionary history in Great Britain, then the prededent is, we have a Parliament and we have a king. Is that the precedent that we are headed for?"

"It's not an accident that the very first liberty in the First article of the Bill of Rights... is the First Ammendment which says "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech," etc... the very first one, the most important one. The ability to have free and robust debate, free and robust political speech."

"Something that Mr. Raskin and his team... brought up, is that it's... somehow a suggestion from former president Trump's team that when various former public officials were not denouncing the violence... over the summer, that that was somehow, the former president equating that speech to his own. Not at all! Exactly backwards!"

"I saw a headline, representative so-and-so seeks to walk-back comments about... something that bothered her. I was devastated when I saw that she thought it was necessary to go on television yesterday or the day before and say she needs to walk-back her comments. She should be able to comment as much as she wants, and she should be able to say exactly as she feels... [I]f she feels that the supporters of president Trump... are not worthy of having their ideas considered, she should be able to say that, and anybody who agrees should be permitted to say they agree."

"That's what we broke away... from Great Britain in order to be able to do. To be able to say what we thought in the most robust political debate."

"I don't expect, and I don't believe that the former president expects anybody to walk-back any of the language. If that's how they feel about the way things transpired over the last couple of years in this country, they should be allowed to say that, and I will go to court and defend them, if anything happens to them as a result. If the government takes action against that... U.S. representative who wants to walk-back her comments, if the government takes action against her, I have no problem in defending her right to say those things, even though I don't agree with them."

"This trial is not about trading liberty for security. ...It's about suggesting that it is a good idea that we give up those liberties that we have so long fought for. We have sent armies to other parts of the world to convince those governments to implement the freedoms that we enjoy."

"This trial... is about trading liberty for security from the mob? Honestly, no! It can't be! We can't be thinking about that. We can't possibly be suggesting that we punish people for political speech in this country, and if people go and commit lawless acts as the result of their beliefs, and they cross the line, they should be locked up!"

"I've seen... quite a number of the complaints that were filed against the people who breached the capitol. Some of them charged [with] conspiracy. Not a single one... charged with conspiracy with the forty-fifth president of the United States, probably because prosecutors have an ethical requirement that they are not allowed to charge people with criminal offenses without probable cause. You might consider that."

"[I]f we go down the road that... Mr. Raskin asks you to go down, the flood gates will open."

"I was going to say, originally, it will release the whirlwind... a biblical reference, but I subsequently learned... that that particular phrase is already taken..."

"[T]he political pendulum will shift one day. This chamber and the chamber across the way will change one day, and partisan impeachments will become commonplace."

"[U]ntil the no one alive had ever lived through a presidential impeachment, not unless some of you are 150 years old. Not a single person alive had lived through a presidential impeachment. Now most of us have lived through three of them. This is supposed to be the ultimate safety valve. The last thing that happens. The most rare treatment, and a session in where this body is sitting as a court of impeachment, among the most rare things it does."

"So the slippery slope principle will have taken hold if we continue to go forward with what is happening today and scheduled to happen later this week... [A]fter we are long done here, and after there has been a shift in the political winds, and after there is a change in the makeup of the United States House of Representatives, and maybe a change in the makeup of the United States Senate, the pressure from those folks back home, especially for members of the House, is going to be tremendous, because remember, the Founders recognized that (the argument that I started with that) political pressure is driven by the need for immediate action, because something under contemporary community standards really horrific happened and the people represented by the United States House of Representatives become incensed! And what do you do in a federal issue if you're back in suburban Philadelphia, and something happens that makes the people who live there insensed? You call your congressman, and your congressman, elected every two years with their pulse on the people in their district... they respond. A congressman calls you back. A staffer calls you back. You get all the information they have on the issue. Sometimes you even get invited to submit language that would improve whatever the issue is."

"[W]hen the pendulum swings, perhaps the next person impeached and is sent here for you to consider is Eric Holder, during "Fast and Furious"... or any other person that the other party considers to be a political danger to them down the road because of their avowed abilities, ...and being articulate, and having a résumé... that shows that they are capable. ...The Republicans might regain the House in two years. History does tend to suggest that the party out of power in the White House does well in the mid-term elections, and certainly the... 2020 elections... the House majority narrowed, and there was a gain of the Republicans."

"[T]he members of the House, they have to worry about these consequences, because if they don't react to whatever the "problem of the day" is, somebody in that jurisdiction... is going to say, "If you make me the congressman, I'll react to that." And that means that the sitting member has to worry about it, because their terms are short. And it's not just the members of the House of Representatives with their short... terms. I saw on television the last couple of days, the honorable... Mr. Sasse... faced backlash back home because of a vote he made some... weeks ago. ...[T]he political party was complaining about a decision he made... Nebrask is quite... a judicial thinking place, and just maybe Senator Sasse is on to something. You'll hear about what it is that the Nebraska courts have to say about the issue that you all are deciding this week. There seem to be some pretty smart jurists in Nebraska, and I can't believe that a United States senator doesn't know that."

"A senator like the gentleman from Nebraska whose supreme court history is ever-present in his mind, and rightfully so, he... faces the whirlwind, even though he knows what the judiciary in his state thinks."

"People back home will demand their House members continue the cycle as political fortunes rise and fall. The only entity that stands between the bitter infighting that led to the downfall of the Greek republic, and the , and the American Republic is the Senate of the United States."

"Shall the business of the Senate and thus the nation come to a halt? Not just for the current weeks, while a new president is trying to fill out his administration, but shall the business of the Senate and the nation come to a halt because impeachment becomes the rule, rather than the rare exception?"

"I know you can see this as a possibility because not a single one of you thought you would be doing a second impeachment inside of thirteen months. And the pressure will be enormous to respond in kind."

"To quote Everett Dirksen, "The gallant men and women of the Senate will not allow that to happen, and this Republic will endure" because the top responsibility of a United States Senator, and the top characteristic that you all have in common... there isn't a single one of you who A, doesn't consider yourself a patriot of the United States, and two, there isn't a single one of you who doesn't consider the other 99 to be patriots of the United States. And that is why this attack on the Constitution will not prevail."

"The document that is before you is flawed. The rule of the Senate concerning impeachment documents, Articles of Impeachment, Rule 23 says that "such documents cannot be divided." You might have seen that we wrote that... It might have been a little legalistic or legalese for the newspapers to opine on very much, but there is some significance. The House managers, clever fellows that they are, they cast a broad net. They need to get 67 of you to agree they're right. And that's a good strategy. I would use the same strategy, except there is a rule that you can't use that strategy. ...[R]ule 23 says that... the articles of impeachment's indivisible, and the reason why that's significant is [that] you have to agree that every single aspect of the entire document warrants impeachment, because it's an all-or-nothing document. You can't cut out parts that you agree with [that] warrant impeachment and parts that don't, because it's not divisible."

"It flat out says in the Senate Rules it's not divisible. Now, previous impeachments like President Clinton said... the president shall be found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors for engaging in one or more of the following, and then gives the list. So... all you had to do was win one. But you didn't do that here. It has to be all or nothing, and some of these things that you are asked to consider might be close calls in your mind. But one of them is not."

"The argument about the Fourteenth Amendment is absolutely ridiculous."

"The House managers tell you that the president should be impeached because he violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and here's what the Fourteenth Amendment says, "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or any other State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or [as] a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution [of the United States], [and] shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may [by a] vote [by] of two-thirds of each House, [to] remove such disability.""

"Now, it doesn't take a constitutional scholar to recognize that that's written for people who fought for the Confederacy who are previous military officers who are in the government in or of the Confederacy, and it doesn't take a constitutional scholar to require that they be convicted first, in a court, with due process of law. So... that question can never be ripe until those things have happened. Now, if you agree with those arguments, and I know you'll all get your constitutions out and you'll read it; and if you agree with those arguments, the suggestion that the Fourteenth Amendment applies here is ridiculous! And if you come to that conclusion then, because the managers have not separated out the... any counts within the article of impeachment, the whole thing falls. I didn't write that. They are married to that."

"I wrote it out in individual responses because I didn't know how to respond to the... "cast a wide net" effort. And fortunately, senators some time in the past realized that you can't do that because you passed... a rule that says, "Hey, you can't do that!" So that's why it's flawed, and it's flawed in other ways too..."

"[W]hy are the House managers afraid, and why is the majority of the House of Representatives afraid of the American people?"

"Let's understand why we are really here. We are really here because the majority in the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political rival in the future. That's the real reason we're here. That's why they have to get over the jurisdictional hurdle (which they can't get over) but that's why they have to get over that, in order to get to that part of the Constitution that allows removal. ...Nobody says it that plainly but unfortunately I have a way of speaking that way."

"[T]he reason I am having trouble with the argument is the American people just spoke, and they just changed administrations. So in the light most favorable to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle here, their system works. The people are smart enough, in the light most favorable to them, they're smart enough to pick a new administration if they don't like the old one, and they just did, and he's down there on Pennsylvania Avenue right now, probably wondering, "How come none of my stuff is happening up at the Capitol?""

"Why do the members of the House of Representatives, the majority of the House... Why are they afraid of the very people that sent them to do this job, the people they hope will continue to send them back here? Why are they afraid that those same people who were smart enough to pick them as their Congressmen, aren't smart enough to pick somebody who is a candidate for president of the United States?"

"Why fear that the people will all of a sudden forget how to choose an administration in the next few years? And in fact, this happens all the time when there are changes in administrations from one-term presidents to others. Well, Nixon was sort of a 1 1/2 term, but Nixon to Ford, Ford to Carter, Carter to Reagan, Bush 41 to Clinton; it happens! The people get tired of an administration they don't want, and they know how to change it! And they just did!"

"So why think that they won't know how to do it in 2024, if they want to? Or is that what the fear is... that the people in 2024 will, in fact will want the change, and will want to go back to Donald Trump, and not the current occupant of the White House, President Biden? Because all these other times the people were smart enough to do it (choose who the president should be) and all these other times they're smart enough to choose who their members of Congress were, and by way. choose you all as well, but they're not smart enough to know how to change the administration, especially since they just did. So it seems pretty evident to me that they do know how."

"It has worked 100% of the time. 100% of the time, in the United States, when the people... had been fed up with, and had enough of the occupant of the White House, they change the occupant of the White House."

"Now I know that one of the strengths of this body is its deliberative action, and I saw Senator Manchin on the TV the other night talking about the , and the main point was that... this body has an obligation to try to reach consensus across the aisle, to legitimize the decisions it makes. ....I think ...that is a good way of saying why the Senate of the United States is different than other places. You know, the Constitution is a document designed to protect the rights of the minority, not the rights of the majority. Congress shall make no law abridging all of these things. That's because those were the things that were of concern at the time."

"It's easy to be in favor of liberty, and equality, and free speech when it's popular."

"We changed what we were going to do on account that the House managers' presentation was well done, and I wanted you to know that we have responses to those things. I thought that what the first part of the case was, which was the equivalent of a motion to dismiss, was going to be about jurisdiction alone, and... one of the... fellows who spoke for the House managers, who is a former criminal defense attorney, seemed to suggest that there is something nefarious that we were discussing jurisdiction in trying to get the case dismissed, but this is where it happens in the case, because jurisdiction is the first thing that has to be found."

"We have counter-arguments to everything that they raised, and you will hear them later... but on the... scholarly issue of jurisdiction... Article I, section 3 says "Judgements in cases of impeachment shall not extend further that to removal from office, and disqualification to hold any office of honor, trust, profit in the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment trial, judgement and punishment according to law." So this idea... of a January amnesty is nonsense. If my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that president Trump committed a criminal offense, and let's understand, a high crime is a felony, a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The words haven't changed that much over time. After he's out of office, you go and arrest him. So there is no opportunity where the president of the United States can run rampant in January at the end of his term, and just go away Scott free. The Department of Justice does know what to do with such people, and so far I haven't seen any activity in that direction, and not only that, the people who stormed this building and breached it were not accused of conspiring with the president."

"But the section I read, judgement, in other words, the bad thing that can happen, the judgement, in cases of impeachment, i.e., what we are doing, "shall not extend further than removal from office..." What is so hard about that? ...Which of those words are unclear? "Shall not extend further than removal from office..." President Trump is no longer in office. The object of the Constitution has been achieved. He was removed by the voters!"

"Cassidy was one of six Republican senators to vote with Democrats to say that it was constitutional to impeach a former president even after he has left office. The other five Republican senators had done so in a similar vote last month."

"Trump’s team lost a crucial bid to halt the trial on constitutional grounds. Senators confirmed, 56-44, their jurisdiction over the trial, the first of a president no longer in office."