Baldwin: Senate acquittal puts Trump ‘above the law’
WASHINGTON – In what was almost a pure party-line set of votes, Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin voted Wednesday to convict President Donald Trump on two articles of impeachment and Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson voted to acquit him.
Trump was acquitted on both charges by the U.S. Senate, with all but one Republican (Utah’s Mitt Romney) opposing his conviction and removal by voting “not guilty,” and every Democrat supporting it by voting “guilty.” Romney voted to convict Trump of abuse of power but not obstruction of Congress.
In a floor speech a few hours before the vote, Baldwin said that the Senate would be “putting this president above the law” by not convicting him on the two articles.
“I refuse to join this president’s cover-up and I refuse to conclude that the president’s abuse of power doesn’t matter — that it’s OK and that we should just get over it,” Baldwin said in a Senate floor speech.
Johnson said in a statement after the vote:
“I am glad that this unfortunate chapter in American history is over. The strength of our republic lies in the fact that, more often than not, we settle our political differences at the ballot box, not on the streets or battlefield — and not through impeachment.”
It takes two-thirds of the Senate to remove a president. Romney provided the biggest drama before the vote by announcing his support for removal on one article, making him the only Republican in Congress to support either impeachment or conviction. Romney said Trump used American aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden.
Johnson did not give a floor speech this week about his impeachment vote, as most of his colleagues did. But he has been one of Trump’s most outspoken defenders over Ukraine.
Johnson has accused Democrats of making a “mountain out of a molehill.”
“Impeachment should be reserved for the most serious of offenses where the risk to our democracy simply cannot wait for the voters’ next decision. That was not the case here,” he said in his statement after the votes.
In a conference call with Wisconsin reporters Tuesday, Johnson said the conduct that Trump is accused of does not rise to the level of impeachment, that the impeachment fight was bad for the country, that it was a partisan impeachment, and that his own vote against hearing witnesses in the Senate trial reflected his view that doing so would have extended the trial “even further into an election year (which) didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“I never viewed (Trump’s) desire to go find out what happened in Ukraine as having anything to do with the 2020 election. It was all a look back” at 2016, said Johnson, referring to Trump’s suspicions that people in Ukraine played a role in creating a “false narrative” about him colluding with Russia.
In her floor remarks, Baldwin accused her Republican colleagues of shutting out evidence and witnesses “because they didn’t want to be bothered with the truth.”
In decrying the failure to call former National Security Adviser John Bolton as a witness, she also alluded to her Wisconsin colleague Johnson’s own role in events. Baldwin cited published reports about a book manuscript by Bolton, saying Bolton’s account contradicts what Trump had told Johnson in a conversation last summer when the president flatly denied withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine in order to pressure that country to launch political investigations sought by Trump.
Baldwin said the refusal to call Bolton as a witness was part of a failure to conduct a “full fair and honest impeachment trial.”
“John Bolton not only has direct evidence that implicates President Trump in a corrupt abuse of power,” Baldwin said. “He has direct evidence that President Trump lied to one of our colleagues in an attempt to cover it up. It may not matter to this Senate, but I can tell you it matters to the people of the state of Wisconsin that this president did not tell their senator the truth.”