In the closing scene of Stanley Kramer’s great film Judgment at Nuremberg, Presiding Justice Spencer Haywood visits the convicted defendant Dr. Ernst Janning in his cell. Janning, a once- esteemed magistrate who sided with the Nazis, asks Haywood to believe that "I never knew that it would come to this." Judge Haywood replies, "Herr Janning, it came to this the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent."
This exchange came to mind while watching the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. The issue at hand was not convicting an innocent man but acquitting a guilty one. It’s possible that some of the 43 senators who voted for acquittal did so because they sincerely believed the Constitution limits impeachment to presidents still in office. And some may have dismissed the trial as the latest in an ongoing effort by Democrats to discredit Trump in what the former president denounced as a “witch hunt.”
But these issues were nothing more than a sideshow mounted to provide a rationale for Republicans who voted to acquit because they feared Trump’s retribution. The core of Trump’s defense, brazenly offered up against a floodtide of evidence of his guilt, was that the president did nothing wrong. One is reminded of another old movie, this one featuring the Marx Brothers. Chico tells a woman who’s skeptical about something he’s telling her: “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” Forty-three members of a Senate, self-described as the world’s largest deliberative body, cravenly chose to believe what they were being told.