U.S. Supreme President will be in the spotlight in Trump's impeachment

In charge of Donald Trump's trial in the United States Senate, Justice John Roberts, president of the Supreme Court, will have his performance thoroughly tested by Democrats and Republicans who, in one of the rare cases of convergence. Both sides accuse the U.S. Supreme Court of being cracked by partisanship. Trump's trial - and Roberts' inevitable examination - began on Thursday the 16th,

Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court by Republican President George Bush in 2005. Averse to public exposure, it should essentially be limited to keeping the process underway in the Senate. The jurist, however, may be called upon to decide on a fundamental issue in Trump's trial: whether new witnesses and others already heard should be summoned to testify and whether additional evidence can be included in the process, as democratic opposition wants.

The American Constitution does not give very specific attributions to those who assume the function. It only determines that the president of the Supreme must "preside" over the Senate session "when the President of the United States is tried." The initiative aims to avoid conflicts of interest, since the upper house speaker is the country's vice president, a position currently assumed by former Indiana State Governor Mike Pence.

As the regulation established by senators in 1868 determines, when Andrew Johnson became the first president in the country's history to stand trial for impeachment, any decision by the President of the Supreme Court during the process can be reversed by a simple majority in plenary.

Republicans control the Senate with 53 out of 100 seats, which theoretically gives them a better base than that of Democrats to absolve Trump. The president will only be convicted and ousted from office if convicted by a two-thirds majority of the plenary or 67 votes.

Test for the Supreme

While Roberts' role is not decisive in the impeachment case, the case should test the jurist, as the Washington Postdescribes , with "risks beyond judgment" taking into account the accusations of bias and partisanship against Roberts and the entire U.S. Supreme Court.

"The American people will be watching [the trial]. Roberts will be seen as responsible for ensuring that this trial is robust and transparent," constitutionalist Elizabeth Wydra said on her blog at the Constitutional Accountability Center portal. "Perhaps the only one again in recent years that the Supreme Court has been so dramatically in the public eye was in the brutal and partisan battle in the appointment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh," he concludes.

With republican Republican Kavanaugh, trump's nominee for the vacancy of the most moderate Anthony Kennedy, the court would have entered "his most conservative era since 1937," law professor Lee Epstein of the University of Washington in St. Louis told The New York Timesafter the jurist's confirmation of the Senate post in October 2018.