Senator McConnell has made his intentions plain: This will be a show trial, designed to quickly dismiss the serious charges against the President. He has rejected Senator Schumer's request to call critical witnesses with 1st-hand knowledge, including the acting White House chief of staff and the President's national-security advisor at the time. McConnell complained that calling these witnesses is a pathway "to get to guilty."

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The House has voted to impeach the President. Now, it is the Senate's solemn duty to conduct a full and fair trial to determine whether the President should be removed from office.

When the impeachment trial begins, every Senator will take this oath:

"I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of [President Donald Trump], now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws. So help me God."

But Senator McConnell has already made his intentions plain: This will be a show trial, designed to quickly dismiss the serious charges against the President.

He has rejected Senator Schumer's request to call critical witnesses with first-hand knowledge, including the acting White House chief of staff and the President's national-security advisor at the time.

Senator McConnell actually complained that calling these witnesses is a pathway "to get to guilty". Isn't that awfully telling?

The Republicans are effectively telling us that party comes over country, that fealty to the President is above fealty to the Constitution.

I can't promise you today how this is going to go. But know this: I'm going to keep fighting with everything I've got to stand up for the truth and for a full discussion before the American people. This moment demands our loyalty to the Constitution above party, to our country above party, and a complete determination to get the full facts and fair proceedings for all involved.

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Daily Kos put it this way:

Last night, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in all 50 states, to rally their support for Trump's impeachment.

Congress voted today to impeach Trump for abusing the power of the office of the president and covering up his attempt to interfere in the 2020 election. This was the third impeachment vote in our nation's history.

After the vote in the House, our efforts turn to the Senate where a trial will be held in January. Republicans are already doing everything they can to sabotage that trial:

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week on Fox News that he will coordinate directly with the White House on the impeachment trial, saying that "there is no difference between the president's position and our position" on impeachment.
  
  
• Sen. Lindsey Graham recently announced that his only goal is to end this trial as soon as possible and that "I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here." This goes against the oath that he will be taking in a matter of weeks that he will be an "impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God."
  
  
• After Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer proposed a fair and transparent trial in the Senate with firsthand witnesses like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and national-security advisor John Bolton testifying, the White House said NO and #MoscowMitch marched onto the Senate floor to relay the White House's orders.
  

McConnell and Graham have already sold their souls to Trump. But there are still some Republican senators that we can reach. We are taking our campaign directly to the home states of vulnerable and persuadable senators, namely:

• Susan Collins in Maine
• Cory Gardner in Colorado
• Martha McSally in Arizona
• Joni Ernst in Iowa
• Thom Tillis in North Carolina
• Lisa Murkowski in Alaska
• Mitt Romney in Utah

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev