Biden Plays ‘Good Cop’ With Trump on Trial in the Senate
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President Joe Biden, who campaigned on bringing unity to a painfully divided nation, isn’t wasting his time going after Republicans or demanding punishment of his predecessor for allegedly inciting a deadly riot.
He’s leaving that to Congress.
So minority Republicans are feeling left out and want to have a say in the COVID-19 relief package they think is too expensive? Biden magnanimously met with a team of Republican senators – then let congressional Democrats move ahead on a budget resolution that wouldn’t require any GOP votes to pass.
And when it comes to an unprecedented second Senate trial for Donald Trump, Biden is staying out of the theatrics and legal drama on the Hill.
As senators and viewers around the country watched an emotional Rep. Jamie Raskin lay out his case against Trump, Biden was headed into a White House meeting with business leaders to talk about bringing economic relief to companies hit hard by the pandemic.
Raskin, Maryland Democrat whose young adult son took his own life on New Year’s Eve, described bringing his daughter to Capitol, Hill just a week later for the counting of the Electoral College votes – and wondering if they all were going to die at the hands of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol that day.
He promised his daughter Tabitha that the next time she came to the Capitol would be better. “She said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol,'” Raskin recounted, twinning the tragedies of his family’s loss with the threat to democracy and its most prominent symbol that day. A choked-up Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, requested a break in proceedings after Raskin’s wrenching speech.
Biden, meanwhile, told reporters he wasn’t going to be following the historic proceedings.
“I am not,” the president said, when asked if he’d be watching the Senate debate on TV. “Look, I told you before: I have a job,” Biden said, “My job is to keep people – we’ve already lost over 450,000 people. We’re going to lose a whole lot more if we don’t act, and act decisively and quickly. A lot of people, as I said, are going – a lot of children are going to be hungry. A lot of families are food insecure. They’re in trouble. That’s my job. The Senate has their job. They’re about to begin it. I’m sure they’re going to conduct themselves well. And that’s all I’m going to have to say about impeachment.”
The approach allows Biden, whose grandfatherly image served as a positive contrast to Trump’s bombastic one, to play “good cop” to congressional Democrats’ “bad cop.” Biden may not make threats or push a unilateral approach to lawmaking, but he benefits when his allies in Congress do so. If Congress passes Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan by making it part of “budget reconciliation” – a process that can be done with a simple majority – that’s on Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
If Senate Democrats at some point get fed up with the filibuster and move to get rid of the procedure, Biden – who has supported keeping the time-honored rule – might then bemoan the death of more cooperative days gone. But he’d still get his agenda passed more easily.
The impeachment trial of Trump is not something Biden wants to get involved in directly. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has repeatedly reminded reporters that the process is in the hands of the Senate and not the executive branch. The same goes for the fate of GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia lawmaker who had her committee assignments taken away for promoting conspiracy theories and encouraging insurrectionists on social media.
But those actions – while perhaps not leading to the downfall of either Trump or Greene – serve to divide the GOP, helping Biden. It does not appear that Senate Democrats will get the 67 votes needed to convict Trump in the Senate. But the very proceedings will force GOP senators to go on the record one way or the other, leaving them vulnerable to attack from either pro-Trump loyalists or more mainstream Republicans.
Some of that division was already evident even in Trump’s defense team. The first Trump lawyer to argue on the former president’s behalf, Bruce Castor, said Democrats were foolish to go after Trump because their candidate had already won the presidency fair and square – directly contradicting Trump, who has insisted the election was “stolen” from him.
The second lawyer, David Schoen, took a more ominous approach, arguing that the Democrats’ attempt to hold Trump responsible for the violent insurrection could result in more of the same.
“This trial will tear this country apart, perhaps like we have only seen once before in our history,” Schoen said. After a mostly party-line vote to confirm its constitutionality, the Senate geared up to start the formal trial on Wednesday, continuing the rest of the week. Biden, meanwhile, will travel to the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon to advance his legislative agenda.
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