It looks like the Senate vote in the impeachment trial will take place tomorrow. There are various guesses as to how many Republicans will vote for conviction; we can expect all Democrats to vote to convict. . It certainly appears at this point that they will not get to 67. How many they will get is hard to say. Republican psychology would seem to indicate that the movement would be away from conviction, because once it is pretty well assured that they cannot get 67, and thus strength in numbers, which Republicans would be courageous enough to stand out there and go against Republican voters, who continue to want acquittal? It is not in their nature.
Apparently even Murkowsi may be leaning toward acquittal. This kind of thing would be mind-boggling, except that we’ve become inured to it. As many have said, if you can’t impeach and convict a president for this, what can you do it for? Well, most of the Republicans voted for conviction of President Clinton, so maybe that is their marker, lying about oral sex, the line in the sand you must never cross, or they’ll vote to remove you from office.
It has also been suggested that if Trump is acquitted, it means that the next president who is a Republican (a Democrat would never do it, and they know this, which is why they are not worried about precedent), could engineer a similar coup, and it will either work; or it won’t, and he will not be punished by them This is the kind of “win ether way” that they love.
The whole thing is appalling. They saw those films, those screams of pain from the police officers, the rampaging people shouting epithets, pounding on doors, yelling, “Where are you? Come on out!!,” like some horror movie come to real life. And yet, the vast majority of them won’t convict. Why? Someone, I think from one of the normally “conservative” publications, wrote that someone told him that if there were a secret ballot, the vote would be 90-10 in favor of conviction. Well, we’ve heard that kind of thing before. Maybe it has become a reflexive way to cover themselves. “They really wanted to do the right thing; they knew that what the President did and did not do was wrong…but you know, their voters, and raising money,…and so, they just couldn’t.” That’s sort of the equivalent of asking for a medal in an event you were afraid to participate in, because, you would have vaulted over the bar had you actually tried it!
Republicans have shown us what they are as a party, over and over, and yet many of us, including me, keep hoping that there is something that even they will stand up against. A few will. Some think that there are up to ten Republicans who will vote for conviction, but right now we can only be relatively sure of three of them: Romney, Sasse, who saw Trump gleefully watching the attack, and Collins. Maybe Cassidy, maybe Toomey and Murkowski. Maybe one surprise of an unexpectedly brave one. The rest, even after seeing all of this, will take refuge in the ludicrous defenses tossed out to them by their attorneys. Let’s recite the liturgy:: “You can’t try a president after he has left office….the Democrats didn’t develop the evidence…Trump didn’t intend for this to happen…there was violence in different cities last summer….Democrats have used the word ‘fight’at different times..,it would be bad precedent…There, is that enough to give you cover? You are Republicans, after all, you can do the rest of the stonewalling.”
Meanwhile, the insurrectionists keep claiming that they are not guilty, because Trump asked or ordered them to be there, and support him. So they are not guilty, and the senators say that Trump is not guilty; so who is guilty? Kevin McCarthy says that we are all guilty. “I shouted out who killed the Kennedys?//when after all it was you and me.” (The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy For the Devil”), The Nuremberg defendants said that they were just following orders, the leaders said that they had the right to do it all, no one was guilty.
Everyone loves the metaphor of Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown. But it’s not like that here, we mostly know better. Even the gallant House managers did not have high expectations, but they gave it their all, and those presentations will be shown many times. Actually, to be completely pragmatic, the best result, given that we were not going to have a courageous statement by an overwhelming majority of Senators, would be something like 57-43 in favor of conviction; Trump obtaining only the nominal ability to avoid conviction while a majority of the Senate voted for it. Let’s see the Republicans and their media try to spin that into something to get the voters excited about the next election. “We got 46% of the popular vote! We got 43% of the vote for acquittal!”
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