The rules are very clear: John Roberts will be making the key decisions.
currently in force for the conduct of impeachments. These rules explicitly provide that the chief justice “shall” preside over the trial, that it is the “Presiding Officer” who “shall direct all forms of the proceedings,” and that he may “rule on all questions of evidence including, but not limited to, questions of relevancy, materiality, and redundancy of evidence.”
What is more, “the doors of the Senate shall be kept open” so that the nation at large can come to its own decision on the president’s guilt or innocence. It is only when, after hearing all the evidence, senators retire to engage in jury-style deliberations that they can close their doors to the public.
But if McConnell wants to change the rules, he had better move fast. If the House votes to impeach the president this week, he will be under a compelling obligation to follow the existing rules in their current form.
At the present moment, the House has not even impeached Trump yet, and so the time is not yet ripe for Roberts to replace Pence in the chair. In the meantime, McConnell is exploiting the vacuum for his own self-aggrandizement. Nevertheless, once Roberts takes over the gavel “immediately” after the bill of impeachment passes over to the Senate, I have no doubt that he will resist any effort to transform the rules’ demand for an “impartial” trial into a partisan power play.
Given Roberts’ repeated efforts to sustain the court’s legitimacy in the past, there is every reason to expect him to stand his ground and refuse to allow McConnell’s motion to be considered on the floor. If McConnell continued to defy Roberts and insisted that his colleagues back him up, it seems highly unlikely that his fellow Republicans would provide him with the bare majority needed to provide appropriate window dressing for his attempted constitutional coup. Sens.
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