The trial

It has been amended 27 times, so far. So, not impossible.

Interestingly, the most recent amendment took 202 years, 223 days to be ratified by enough states to make it part of the constitution.

 

I don't know. What has your question got to do with the impeachment trial for Trump?

 

Excerpts from an article from The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland, today. Link here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/12/acquitting-trump-grave-danger-us-democracy

Bold emphasis is mine.

Rare is the trial that takes place at the scene of the crime. Rarer still is the trial where the jurors are also witnesses to, if not victims of, that crime. Which means that the case of Donald Trump should be open and shut, a slam-dunk. ....And yet, most watching the second trial of Trump ... presume that it will end in his acquittal. ....Trump will pronounce himself vindicated, the case against him a hoax and he will be free to run again in 2024 – and to loom over his party as its dominant presence at least until then.
....

The Democratic members of the House of Representatives acting as prosecutors have .... reminded senators – and the watching public – of the vehemence and violence of the mob that stormed the Capitol last month, how Trump supporters attacked police officers, even using poles carrying the American flagto bludgeon those in uniform. They’ve shown how close the rioters came to finding elected officials, how they hunted them down marbled corridors and stone staircases, looking for “fucking traitors”. They had a gallows and noose ready.

Naturally, Republicans have bitten their lip and said how awful it all was – but have insisted none of it can be blamed on Trump. .... Except those who sacked the Capitol ... filmed as they told the besieged police that they had been “invited” there by the president, that they were “fighting for Trump” at his urging. They believed they were following his explicit instructions.

The incitement was not confined to that speech.... Trump ... [had] been whipping up his supporters for nearly a year, telling them the 2020 election would be stolen, that the only way he could possibly lose would be if the contest was rigged. The big lie that drove the crowd to break down the doors and run riot was that Trump had won and Joe Biden had lost the election – that a contest that was, in fact, free and fair was instead fraudulent, despite 59 out of 60 claims of voter fraud being thrown out of courts across the US through lack of evidence.

....

Couple that with Trump’s failure to do anything to stop the violence once it had begun – the two-hour delay before sending backup for the police – and the picture is complete: a president who urged a murderous mob to overturn a democratic election by force, who watched them attempt it, who did nothing to stop it and even directed their anger towards specific, named targets. Put it this way, what more would a president have to do to be found guilty of inciting an insurrection?

Republicans have sought refuge in the first amendment, saying Trump’s words were protected by his right to free speech, or else that it’s improper to convict a president once he’s left office. Most legal scholars wave aside those arguments, but let’s not pretend Republicans’ objections are on legal grounds. They are not acting as sincere jurors, weighing the evidence in good faith. ....

No, the law is not driving these people to say Trump should be given a free pass for his crime. It is fear. They felt fear on 6 January, when some of them went on camera to beg Trump to call off his mob, but they feel a greater fear now. They fear the threat Trump made in his speech that day, when he told the crowd “we have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight”. Republican senators fear internal party challenges from Trumpists in their states, and they fear a base that is now the obedient creature of Donald Trump. Their only way out, they think, is to acquit a man they surely know – must know – is guilty as charged.

The consequences are perilous. Most directly, Trump will be able to run again, and will be free to try the same trick anew – unleashing his shock troops to ensure his will is done. If Trump loses, say, the New Hampshire primary in 2024, what’s to prevent him urging his devotees to “stop the steal” once more? Even after Trump is gone, a grim precedent will exist. House Democrat Jamie Raskin was right to warn Republicans that acquittal would “set a new terrible standard for presidential misconduct”. When a future president doesn’t get their way, they can simply incite violence against the system they are pledged to defend.

Still, the greatest danger is not in the future. It is clear and present. It is that one of the US’s two governing parties is poised to approve the notion that democracy can be overturned by force. By acquitting Trump, the Republicans will declare themselves no longer bound by the constitution or the rule of law or even reality, refusing to break from the lie that their party won an election that it lost. This poison is not confined to the extremities of the US body politic. It is now in its blood and in its heart.​

 

What is the relevance of your concern about that to the topic of Trump's trial?

You think that the votes of people in the "fly-over" states you mention should be worth more than the votes of people in the "coastal metropolitan areas".

Why is that? What's wrong with one person, one vote?

A poor and obfuscatory argument put by Trump's defence team. An example of "whataboutism". Rather than trying to refute the claim that Trump told his supporters to fight, Trump's lawyers chose to take many remarks made by Democrats completely out of context. None of the Democrat's said "fight" in a context of inciting violent insurrection. One of the "fight"s quoted, for example, was Biden, from a speech where he was talking about "fighting" for affordable health care.

But even if, by some chance, Trump's lawyers could show that some Democrat somewhere once called for physical violence, that would do nothing to excuse or explain Trump's incitement of the violent attempt by his supporters to subvert American democracy.

 

No, but the conviction of Trump would make such a vote a no brainer.

One possibility is that he could be disqualified through use of Article 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that no-one can hold office if they've engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" against the United States.

Only a simple majority vote would be needed in both houses to invoke that amendment.

 

What a bizarre thing to say. Whatever gave you that idea?

 

What is?

 

It seems to be a day for people to express themselves out of a sort of information vacuum / fact-free zone.

Here's an idea: why not read up a little and actually inform yourself about what the senate trial is actually about, and how it works?

Something is clearly failing a lot of Americans here. Don't you guys have access to decent media? Can't you google? A lot of you seem to be more interested in conspiracy theories than in what's actually going on in your nation. Some of you seem unable to focus your attention on anything meaningful for the few minutes it would take you to start to understand it.