Comment on House wants to warn future presidents to follow oath

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives told the Senate that the nation “cannot simply ‘move on’” without an impeachment trial and conviction for Donald Trump’s incitement of an insurrection Jan. 6 just because he’s no longer in office — because future presidents would see no harm in trying something similar in their final weeks in office.“If the Senate does not try President Trump (and convict him), it risks declaring to all future Presidents that there will be no consequences, no accountability, indeed no Congressional response at all if they violate their Oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution’ in their final weeks — and instead provoke lethal violence in a lawless effort to retain power,” the House impeachment managers argue in a brief filed Tuesday.Such a situation would “horrify the Framers, who wrote the Presidential Oath of Office into the Constitution and attached no January Exception to it,” the House wrote.That argument about the Senate’s obligation seeks to shut down arguments from Trump’s impeachment legal team and Senate Republicans, 45 of whom voted last week to support a motion to sweep aside the impeachment trial as unconstitutional because Trump is now a private citizen in Florida.“So I’m confident of the outcome here that we’re going to have more than 45 votes for a motion to dismiss on the idea that this is unconstitutional impeachment pursuing somebody out of office,” South Carolina Republican Sen.