The SNL fantasy trial was good for a laugh, but there is genuine and deep concern among many who have seen the damage Putin-- and Moscow Mitch-- have been able to do to American democracy on the cheap. Philip Rucker attempted to give the true nature of the disaster voice in a report on how Trump's acquittal-- as illegitimate as his presidency-- will change the institution of the presidency, perhaps forever. Republicans might quibble, at least in public, with how Rucker began his report. "The evidence of President Trump’s actions to pressure Ukraine was never in serious dispute. After a systematic presentation of the facts of the case, even some Senate Republicans concluded that what he did was wrong. But neither was the verdict of Trump’s impeachment trial ever in doubt. The Senate’s jurors are scheduled to etch an almost-certain acquittal into the historical record on Wednesday. The impending judgment that the president’s actions do not warrant his removal from office serves as a testament to Washington’s extraordinary partisan divide and to Trump’s uncontested hold on the Republican base. The expected acquittal also has profound and long-term ramifications for America’s institutions and the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches, according to numerous historians and legal experts. In effect, they say, the Senate is lowering the bar for permissible conduct for future presidents." Or at least for presidents of the same same party that controls a Senate that Moscow Mitch has shamelessly turned into a shrivelled appendage of the Executive Branch.Keep the results from the national polling NBC and the Wall Street Journal released yesterday, namely that majorities of voters believe that Trump abused his power (52-41%) and obstructed Congress (53-37%) and that Trump is trailing the major Democratic presidential candidates in hypothetical matchups for the general election. According to this poll, Biden leads Trump by 6%, Bernie leads him by 4%, Warren by 3% and even Mayo Pete is ahead of him by 1%. And in the generic battle for Congress, Democrats lead Republicans by 6 points (49-43%).
“It’s a dispiriting moment for an American system that in many ways was founded on the insight that, because humankind is frail and fallen and fallible, no one branch of government can have too much power,” said Jon Meacham, an American historian and author. “The president’s party, instead of being a check on an individual’s impulses and ambitions, has become an instrument of them.”Since the moment House Democrats opened their impeachment inquiry last September, Trump has projected a sense of persecution and self-pity. He called the effort a coup to overthrow him and defraud the results of the 2016 election.Again and again, Trump proclaimed on Twitter, “READ THE TRANSCRIPT!”-- though the notes from his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not seem to exonerate him. Rather, the notes made plain Trump’s scheme to get Ukraine to open an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.With Trump commanding such exceptionally high approval ratings among Republican voters, however, even senators who acknowledged his actions were wrong voted Friday to block new evidence in the trial and pave the way for acquittal.One of Democrats’ great hopes to permit fresh testimony from firsthand witnesses, including former national security adviser John Bolton, had been Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a self-described institutionalist who is retiring and would not have to face the wrath of the GOP’s pro-Trump base.
Yes, one of the Democrats' great hopes... but hopes for what? There were never going to be 20 Republican flips to actually convict Trump. He could hand the deed to Alaska over to Putin in the middle of Fifth Avenue and Dan Sullivan would vote to commend him while Lisa Murkowski just looks on... confused. The Democrats' approach was never really to perform the impossible miracle of persuading the Senate to convict Trump. It was always to persuade the American people Trump shouldn't be reelected in November-- and that neither should the members of his party who backed him. We'll know if they succeeded not on Wednesday, but on election day, 2020. Remember, when Lamar Alexander admitted that Trump’s actions were "inappropriate" and had "already been proven" by House impeachment managers, and that there was "no need for more evidence," he really was helping the Democrats do the job they had set out to do. "Let the people decide," he said.
“This impeachment was a fait accompli at all times,” said Bill Whalen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “You talk to congressional Republicans and there’s a feeling that the president is being persecuted, that impeachment was a conviction in search of a crime.”William A. Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, said acquittal “was not only perfectly predictable, but in my judgment, completely inevitable.”“The United States political scene is as deeply polarized along partisan lines as it has been for at least a century,” Galston added. Noting Trump’s high ratings among Republican voters, he said, “It would take a very brave Republican indeed to break ranks with the president under these circumstances.”This is not the first instance in which Trump has skirted penalties for wielding the powers of his office for personal or political gain. Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found that the president repeatedly worked to block or thwart the Russia investigation, acts to obstruct justice that would have prompted charges were he not a sitting president. But Trump sidestepped any punishment then, just as he appears to now with Ukraine.One of the president’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, proffered a sweeping argument on the floor of the Senate last week that Trump using the powers of his office to pressure Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into the Bidens was not impeachable or illegal because it was done in pursuit of his reelection.“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz said during the trial.In the face of stinging criticism from constitutional scholars and legal experts, Dershowitz said later on Twitter that his comments were being mischaracterized. “A president seeking re-election cannot do anything he wants,” Dershowitz wrote. “He is not above the law.”Still, Dershowitz’s argument was persuasive for some Republican senators looking for arguments with which to defend Trump irrespective of what the evidence showed.“Let’s say it’s true, okay? Dershowitz last night explained that if you’re looking at it from a constitutional point of view, that that is not something that is impeachable,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told reporters.Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said the arguments advanced on Trump’s behalf in the Senate trial could have lasting consequences for the future of presidential power.“The Republicans have embraced a theory that permits future abuses of power,” Naftali said. “The outcome of acquittal was predictable... but I’m afraid that this process in the Senate is more enabling of an abusive president than expected.”The nation’s founders gave Congress oversight responsibilities and powers of impeachment as a check on the executive. Yet, with this week’s likely acquittal of Trump, Meacham argues, the Senate instead has become a tool in the president’s perpetuation of his own power.“It is not hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party treats Donald Trump more like a king than a president,” Meacham said. “That was a central and consuming anxiety of the framers. It is a remarkable thing to watch the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan and the Bushes become an instrument of Donald Trump’s. That’s a massive historical story.”
Late Saturday night, also writing for The Post, Seung Min Kim and Rachael Bade reported how the impeachment trial has solidified Mitt Romney's outlier status among Senate Republicans and how Moscow Mitch was able to manipulate the Republican caucus on behalf of tactics set in the White House for goals set in Moscow. "In the end," the two reporters wrote, "McConnell held his conference together, arguing that witnesses would drag the trial out for weeks and delay other Senate work. Several Republicans acknowledged that the president did use nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine as leverage to benefit himself politically, calling it inappropriate, but argued it wasn’t grounds to oust him from office." In the end it was 100% about electoral politics.
Unlike other issues in the Senate, there were no substantive attempts to broker a bipartisan agreement that would cool tensions, ensuring that the impeachment proceedings began-- and ended-- as a near-partisan exercise.“It has just been a lot harder over the last two weeks to have conversations with Republican friends,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT). “The mood in that room is super tense and super heavy.”Democrats heavily pressured vulnerable Senate Republicans up for reelection this fall, driving a message declaring any trial without witnesses would be a “coverup.” But GOP senators and aides were confident that voters were paying little attention based on a survey conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official campaign arm of Senate Republicans.“You know, Iowans right now-- honest to God-- they want us to get this thing over with,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA). “They’re like, ‘Why aren’t you doing the business of the American public?’”In a closed-door party meeting in McConnell’s suite of offices-- where GOP senators have held some of their most consequential strategy sessions-- it was those precise swing-state Republicans like Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) who said they were prepared to just move on to a final vote without calling additional witnesses.That was after Bolton’s blockbuster allegation, laid out in an unpublished manuscript of his book as reported by the New York Times, that Trump directly tied the holdup of aid to Ukraine to the political investigations.The Times report rocked the GOP conference and made Romney believe it increased the likelihood that more Republicans would join in his effort to call Bolton. At a Jan. 27 lunch, Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) spoke up about a witness trade, appearing to briefly consider the notion. Romney joined them, making a forceful argument that they had a duty as senators to hear all the relevant evidence.
Moscow Mitch prevailed and today Republican senators are trying to defend their votes to not call witnesses. On Meet the Press yesterday, Lamar Alexander, who-- remember-- is retiring, said Trump's behavior may have been bad but was still not impeachable. Alexander: "I think he shouldn’t have done it. I think it was wrong. Inappropriate was the way I’d say-- improper, crossing the line."Iowa imbecilic senator, Joni Ernst, who is, rightfully, one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the Senate and who yesterday called for Congress to start impeachment proceedings against Biden immediately if he's elected, was a guest on State of the Union, said that while the call to pressure the president of Ukraine was "Maybe not the perfect call" and that Trump should have used the Department of Justice to talk with him about corruption, she was still planning to vote for acquittal. As if she ever considered voting otherwise! The Senate will be a far better place without Jimi Ernst.
