McConnell

The top Senate Republican gave his most damning condemnation of Donald Trump, but said the Senate had no power to convict an ex-president. He had refused to try Mr. Trump while he remained in office.  Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, voted to acquit former President Donald J. Trump, although he said it was a “close call.”  McConnell said he believed that Donald J. Trump was undeniably guilty of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” on Jan. 6, when he incited and then failed to do anything to halt a deadly assault on the Capitol.  “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, declared Saturday afternoon in an anti-Trump diatribe so scathing that it could have been delivered by any of the nine House prosecutors seeking a conviction.  But minutes before he spoke, when it came time for the most powerful Republican in Washington to hold Mr. Trump to account on the charge of causing the riot, Mr. McConnell said his hands were tied. It could not be done, he argued. He voted to acquit.  “We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen,” Mr. McConnell, who said he reached that conclusion after “intense reflection,” said as he delivered a lawyerly explanation on the limits of Senate power.  Offering his most damning condemnation of Mr. Trump to date, Mr. McConnell accused the former president of spreading lies about a stolen election that he knew would stoke dangerous acts by his followers — though the senator said little about his own refusal for weeks to recognize President Biden’s victory, which helped create the conditions for Mr. Trump’s claims to continue to spread, unchallenged by top Republicans.  He spoke at length about the unfortunate coincidence of timing that he said deprived the Senate of jurisdiction in the trial, alluding to “scheduling decisions” by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to withhold the impeachment charge until Mr. Trump had left office. He did not dwell on his own refusal to call the Senate back to hear the case while Mr. Trump was still president, except to say that he had been right “not to entertain some light-speed sham process to try to outrun the loss of jurisdiction.”  What McConnell showed is a fear of Trump and ignorance of the law.  As a person with responsibility for making the nation’s laws McConnell showed he, like Trump, lacks the knowledge and intelligence to d  a competent job.