Second Keynote Address.

• Date: 22 June 2022
• Author: Durbin, Senator Richard

I want to thank Professor Frank Bowman and Missouri Law Review for holding this symposium on the impeachment trials of President Donald Trump. The topic is critically important and timely.

It was just two years ago this month that the Senate acquitted President Trump in the first impeachment trial, and one year ago this week, he was acquitted in the second trial for inciting an insurrection against the government of the United States. Now, in the first trial, Republican Senators voted to prohibit the trial managers, the actual prosecutors, from subpoenaing any witnesses or documents. They won because they were in the majority. Before both trials, enough Republican Senators, known as jurors, announced that they had already made up their minds to acquit the President--that the not-guilty verdicts were essentially rendered even before the trial started.

That raises an obvious question. The Constitution sets a high bar, two-thirds of the vote in the Senate to convict and remove a President from office. In the four impeachment trials of three different presidents, that super majority threshold has never been met. The closest, 1868, President Andrew Johnson escaped...