Word: trialing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ideally, the Senate should abandon the public, roll-call procedure that it adopted in 1868 for President Andrew Johnson's trial and instead require the senators to vote anonymously at trial's end to acquit or convict...
...good thinking behind this tradition is the desire for verdicts that are uninfluenced by bribery, harassment and blackmail. Of course, the risk of improper influence is especially great when the president is on trial, as President Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial demonstrated...
This view of history mistakenly assumes that today's Senate is the same Senate that the framers envisioned. It is not, and the record of the debate on September 8, 1787, makes that clear. The delegates who favored the Senate as the place of trial thought the Supreme Court would be more biased and corruptible than the Senate...
Alexander Hamilton didn't see it that way. Writing in Federalist Paper No. 65, Hamilton suggested that in impeachment matters, the House of Representatives would represent public opinion, but the Senate trial would be independent of and insulated from public opinion...
...legislative matters, this is not so troubling because the vast power that small states wield in the Senate is checked by the House of Representatives and the President's veto. But in an impeachment trial, the verdict of the senators is final, so a public, on-the-record vote would not subject the senators to national public opinion so much as it would implement the will of public opinion in the smaller states, unchecked by a more representative body...