Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware unloaded on Donald Trump’s defense team on Tuesday, calling them the “Four Seasons Landscaping of the legal profession” after they crashed and burned on the Senate floor.
“This was some of the weakest argumentation I’ve ever heard,” Sen. Coons said. “I, frankly, have questions about how anyone could have voted today that this was an unconstitutional proceeding given the argumentation we heard.”
As PoliticusUSA’s Jason Easley pointed out, even Republicans think Trump’s defense team performed poorly, making it rather stunning that the Senate vote to move forward with the trial wasn’t 100 to 0.
Video:
“This was some of the weakest argumentation I’ve ever heard,” Sen. Coons says of Trump’s impeachment defense team. pic.twitter.com/qyembg67DA
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) February 10, 2021
Sen. Coons said:
I’ve talked to a couple of Republican senators, and I got to tell you, listening to those two, this was the Four Seasons Landscaping of the legal profession. This was some of the weakest argumentation I’ve ever heard, particularly the first one. I mean just on and on and on without any clear focus or purpose. … I mean this was bad. This was just bad legal argumentation, not well-founded, not well thought out, not very compelling. And then the second, Doug Schoen, he simply replaced with volume what the first guy lacked in argumentation. And in total, it’s hard to believe that anybody bought their constitutional argument. I thought that the House managers who presented today made a focused, concrete, compelling argument, and they had the citations from more than 150 constitutional law professors and scholars, from conservative to progressive to back them up. So I would score the first round as an overwhelming win for the House managers, and I frankly have questions about how anyone could have voted today that this was an unconstitutional proceeding given the argumentation we heard.
This is what happens when no decent lawyer wants to represent you
While the performance of Donald Trump’s defense team was hard to watch on Tuesday, it wasn’t all that surprising given the fact that virtually no decent lawyer was interested in representing the disgraced former president.
The case against Trump, after all, is open-and-shut. Whether Republicans are willing to admit it or not, Trump incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol last month. Their tantrums about timing or process won’t change that.
The fact that any Republican senator was willing to side with Trump’s defense team on Tuesday shows just how disinterested they are in being impartial jurors in this impeachment trial.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
