The Dems are taking a lot of criticism from their voters for calling for a witness, winning the vote, and then, having won the vote they demanded, negotiating away their win and settling for the witness's statement to be entered into the record. Someone said that it's as if they don't like the feel of their boot on the neck of their foe. Being unburdened by a legal education, it's possible that I fail to comprehend the evident magical powers of testimony given under oath, but everyone knows what the witness was going to say, right? So why should it change anything when she says it? No votes were going to change. Everyone already knows Trump shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. More than 40 Republican senators don't care.
If the goal was not to convict, but to demonstrate to the country that the Republican party is morally bankrupt—well, the country already knows that too, unless it never will.
I will give credit where it's due, and good for the seven Republicans who voted to convict, but perhaps their single most defining characteristic is distance from Republican voters. Burr and Toomey are retiring. Sasse, Collins, and Cassidy were all reelected last year and so are not up again until 2026. Romney’s term ends in 2024 and Trump is not popular in his state, Utah. The exception is Murkowski, whose term is up in 2022, and, of course, there is already talk that she will be challenged, perhaps by Sarah Palin, in the Republican primary.
It's impossible to be too cynical about Mitch McConnell. His speech lambasting Trump five minutes after he voted for acquittal was, for him, like a two-putt par on the PGA tour. When he finally said "but," what followed was the notion that a president who's been impeached may not be tried and convicted if he's no longer in office. He didn't mention that he's the one who put off the trial till after Inauguration Day! But absurdity abounds: in the world according to Mitch, a corrupt official who'd been impeached could wait for his trial to start and, if prospects looked dim, forestall conviction by resigning before the vote was taken. Maybe he thinks the Constitution was written by Sarah Palin.
Only seven Republicans voted to convict a president who watched with pleasure on TV as his supporters ransacked the Capitol. "Well, Kevin," the president told his own party's congressional leader, who in a panicked phone call was begging him to call off his mob while the attack was in progress, "I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are." It takes ten Republican votes to end a filibuster. I wonder whether the evidence in the impeachment case against Trump, and the fact that only seven Republicans voted for conviction, has persuaded any Democrats that nothing good can come out of the Senate unless they nix the filibuster.
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