Ed note: This is an opinion piece by out Legal Redress committee chair, Lynn Hogue, published in The , January 30, 2020. Since then, North Carolina’s U.S. Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis voted with the GOP majority in the US Senate to block calling witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on Friday 1/31. 

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R) has already announced that his mind is made up about how he intends to vote in the impeachment trial of President Trump. He said so in a statement to reporters in early December. He intends to vote to acquit President Trump on the charges brought against him in his impeachment trial. (So much for the oath he later took “to do impartial justice.”) Tillis, however, also took an earlier oath when he was sworn in as a senator to “support and defend the Constitution.” We’ll have an opportunity to judge how he intends to keep that oath.

The impeachment of President Trump going on now in the Senate is a trial. The Constitution says so, e.g., Art. I, Sec. 3, cl. 6. And even those whose knowledge of trials is limited to what can be learned from watching “Judge Judy” or “Perry Mason” on TV know that trials require evidence. The judge or jury (the senators are technically like jurors), the decider, examines the evidence, i.e., listens to witnesses (who saw what? who said what?) and looks at documents (what writings exist that shed light on what the parties did or said?), before deciding who and what to believe. Trials require evidence. Thom Tillis may not think he needs to weigh any information, so committed is he to Trump.

But senators who have not prejudged the outcome need a chance to hear and see all the evidence they can before they reach a decision. Otherwise they can’t judge fairly the interests of President Trump as well as the American People’s interest in the integrity of the President and his conduct of public affairs. Votes on the question of evidence are important, probably more important, than the final vote on the merits on whether to convict or acquit. Votes on what evidence will be received and considered reflect constitutional as opposed to political integrity. They go to the heart of what it means to support and defend the Constitution and what it so clearly says.

North Carolina voters will have a chance to judge the extent of Thom Tillis’s faithlessness to his oaths, both his oath to judge impartially and also his oath to support and defend the Constitution. You can judge by the way he votes not only at the trial’s end, but also in the early stages of the impeachment trial. His votes will tell us how seriously he takes his first constitutional obligation to support and defend the Constitution as he pledged to do when he first became our senator. It will also tell us whether he represents the kind of people we in North Carolina see ourselves as: Constitution-respecting, law-abiding, justice-loving. With the election coming, remember that we, and only we, can hold Senator Tillis accountable. Let’s not let ourselves and our Constitution down as we weigh how he does his duty.

Lynn Hogue is a lawyer in Bryson City and chair of the Branch’s Legal Redress Committee.