National Review Editor Mocks Republicans For Acquitting Trump in January 6 Impeachment: ‘How’s That Working Out?’

The editor of National Review‘s print magazine and Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru called out Senate Republicans for failing to convict former president Donald Trump during the impeachment trial held for his role in inspiring the January 6 Capitol riot.

“After Trump lost the 2020 election, he attempted to get state legislatures and courts to ignore or throw out millions of votes based on claims of widespread vote fraud. He never provided any serious evidence for these claims and frequently heard, from his allies and aides, that they had no basis. He lobbied his vice president, Mike Pence, to block the counting of electoral votes, which neither the Constitution nor any statute allowed. And he summoned a crowd to pressure Pence and Congress not to certify that he had lost,” wrote Ponnuru in a summation of the Republican frontrunner’s misdeeds.

According to the conservative pundit, the impeachment process is unencumbered by the various barriers to conviction in criminal court. While the question of whether Trump knew his claims about the 2020 election were false looms large over the charges leveled by Special Counsel Jack Smith earlier this week, Ponnuru called that question “irrelevant to impeachment, which allows Congress to judge that, no matter what Trump believed, someone who persisted in trying to undo an election he had clearly lost should be barred from office.”

“Yet in 2021, most Senate Republicans voted against convicting Trump in his impeachment trial, enough to keep him from being disqualified from running for reelection,” he observed, noting that Republicans’ arguments that impeachment must follow only from a criminal violation were disputed by the Framers.

Alexander Hamilton, for example, wrote that impeachment would be pursued after “the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and that the misconduct would be “POLITICAL” in nature.

“Republican officeholders also thought they had no need to act against Trump because, having been defeated on Election Day and then disgraced on Jan. 6, he would “fade away” as a political force,” asked Ponnuru with no shortage of scorn. “How’s that working out?”

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