1. Here is one of the paragraphs from Sen. Alexander's statement announcing that he will vote No on witnesses and documents:
It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year's ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.
My possibly idiosyncratic point is that forms of the word "inappropriate" deserve here time-and-a-half wages. I think I've noticed that the word has gained an inflated currency in the second half of my adult life. Does it date from President Clinton having deployed it to describe his extra-curriculars with Monica? No, probably he was making use of an existing trend. In the realm of child behavior, what my parents called "bad" is now "inappropriate." When you hear the word, immediately consider the possibility that the speaker is trying to skip past something ugly. In honest language, the word should be reserved for misdeeds on the level of, say, a social gaffe. It would be inappropriate to say "shit" while sipping tea with the queen, but that's not what Trump was impeached for.
2. To persist with the language theme, and to appear plausibly bipartisan, I should say that it annoys the shit out of me when Mayor Pete burnishes his credentials by noting that he's from the "heartland." Where is that? Apparently it includes northwestern Indiana but what exactly are the boundaries? Quite possibly Amy Klobuchar is guilty too but Buttigieg is profligate. What I hate is the implicit assumption that some Americans are more American than other Americans, and that it depends on geography. To spell it out, there's no question about someone living in a small town in Kansas. The Bronx, Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Brentwood—not so much.
3. Though, to be fair, our representative democracy is itself organized in such a way as to elevate some Americans over others. Now that it's apparent that the vote in the impeachment "trial" for more evidence—documents and witnesses—is going to fail in the Senate by 49-51, I did some back of the envelope number grinding, and it turns out that the 49 senators on the losing side of the vote represent, by population, 53% of the country. With regard to the final question, acquittal or conviction, a two-thirds majority of senators is required to give Trump the boot. This means 34 senators have the power to acquit him. The 18 Trumpiest states, as measured by his margin of victory in the 2016 election, have 34 Republican senators, but only 18% of the country's population.
4. The above is not sufficient to account for a 49-51 vote where, according to polls, more than two-thirds of the public sides with the 49. But it's not as if the Republican senators in the 51 are exhibiting courage by supporting a principle over and against public opinion. The 25-30% of always-Trumpers in the population make up considerably more than half the electorate in a Republican primary. Moreover, in a general election against a Democrat, even someone like Cory Gardner, from the bluish purple state of Colorado, has no chance at all without boffo support from always-Trumpers. So the Senate vote on impeachment is completely explicable in terms of political calculation. The merits of the case have nothing to do with it.
5. I was yesterday overstating the case against what's now being called The Dershowitz Rule in the example relating to a bribe offered to an elector in the electoral college. Dershowitz would say this is impeachable, since bribery is a crime, one that's explicitly mentioned in the Constitution's somewhat sketchy enumeration of impeachable offenses—"treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors." But suppose the president, persuaded that his reelection is in the national interest, exercised his authority to raise barriers to voting among demographic groups known to favor his opponent. So long as his methods were sufficiently artful to stay clear of the criminal law, he could not be impeached.
Or suppose that he withheld foreign aid appropriated by the Congress and conditioned its release on the recipient announcing a sham investigation into his political opponent. So long as he thinks his reelection is in the national interest, this is not corrupt, not impeachable. The remedy is to throw him out in an election. It seems an irrelevant detail that a fair election is what he's seeking to overthrow.
6. The vote against witnesses is a windfall for John Bolton.
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