Why the Senate's impeachment trial has way too much in common with the Jim Crow past
Acquitting obviously guilty criminals is a shameful American tradition — but beware the righteous blowback
Donald Trump is scared. The Senate trial following his impeachment for a blackmail and campaign cheating scheme starts next week, and it's driving him to distraction.
He was supposed to host a lame event at the White House on Thursday to bolster fake concerns that white evangelicals are being oppressed, but blew off pandering to his strongest supporters for an hour, likely because he couldn't pry himself away from news coverage of the impeachment trial's kickoff.
After ending the event swiftly, Trump then tweeted angrily, "I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!"
(As with most things the president says, this was untrue — he was impeached weeks ago, in December.)
In other words, exactly what Senate Republicans are planning to do. That becomes more obvious every day as more evidence of Trump's guilt comes out, from the revelations by Rudy Giuliani's former associate Lev Parnas to the Government Accountability Office declaring that Trump broke the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine.
The most disturbing and frequent historical examples of jury nullification come from the Jim Crow South, where it was normal for all-white juries to acquit Klansmen and others who committed racist murders — not because they genuinely believed they were innocent, but because they believed it should be legal for white people to murder black people in cold blood.
Still, the social circumstances of Trump's upcoming acquittal go straight back to those same forces of white supremacy that have led to so many other travesties of justice in the past. After all, the main reason Senate Republicans are averse to taking what seems to be an easy way out — convicting the obviously guilty Trump and letting his Republican Vice President, Mike Pence, take over — is because they fear crossing the notoriously loyal Trump base, who represent their only possible chance of holding onto the Senate or retaking the House this November.
