Former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial kicked off today with a round of debate over whether the trial is constitutional.
Starting at noon tomorrow, each side will have up to 16 hours to make their case to the 100 senators who will decide whether to convict Trump on the charge of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Immediately prior to the insurrection, Trump led a rally in which he proclaimed his oft-repeated lies about the election being stolen and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, where lawmakers were voting to finalize Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
The House impeached Trump a week later, just seven days before Biden took the oath of office.
With the Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, it is unlikely they will reach the two-thirds threshold for conviction.
Trump is the only president to be impeached twice.
The proceedings in the Senate started just after 1 p.m. ET, and debate lasted nearly four hours. The proceedings adjourned just after 5 p.m.
GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy said that he voted in favor of holding an impeachment trial because former President Donald Trump’s defense team did “a terrible job.”
“Trump’s team was disorganized, they did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand. And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments,” Cassidy told reporters at the Capitol.
“Now if I’m an impartial juror and one side is doing a great job and the other side is doing a terrible job on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job,” he said.
The Louisiana senator was one of six Republicans to vote alongside all 50 Democrats on the question of whether the Senate has jurisdiction to try a former president for impeachable offenses.
Cassidy was the only senator to change his vote from the last time the question had been posed to the chamber weeks earlier.
In a statement sent shortly after the vote, Cassidy said, “If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation, I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House Managers and former President Trump’s lawyers.”
“The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The president’s team did not,” he said.
The five other Republicans who voted to hold the trial are Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney of Utah, Maine’s Susan Collins and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
Cassidy’s statement noted that his vote on the question of constitutionality “is not a prejudgment on the final vote to convict.”
