Senate votes to hear no evil
Defying precedent, public opinion and a continuing deluge of damning facts, the U.S. Senate’s Republican majority barreled toward absolving President Trump of impeachment charges Friday. Having refused to hear from a single witness, including one whose firsthand account was emerging even as senators voted to ignore it, they were poised not so much to acquit the president as to quit considering the case against him.
Fiftyone of 53 Republican senators voted to make the culmination of Trump’s impeachment the first of any president or other official to exclude witnesses and other new evidence altogether. While the Republicans were long thought to represent an insurmountable bulwark against the twothirds vote required to convict and remove the president from office, Mitch McConnell’s narrow majority exceeded partisan expectations by failing to mount anything resembling a genuine trial.
It did so even after reports indicated that one willing witness, former national security adviser John Bolton, could offer a firsthand account of the plot at the heart of the House’s abuseofpower charge. On the very day that the Senate voted not to call witnesses, the New York Times revealed more troubling details from Bolton’s forthcoming book, including his account of Trump enlisting him to pressure Ukraine into smearing his enemies some two months before his infamous phone conversation with the country’s president. Bolton’s manuscript also reportedly recounts that Trump explicitly tied a freeze of Ukraine’s military aid to demands that its government announce investigations of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and others.
It’s no wonder a recent poll found that threequarters of voters — including a plurality of Republicans — wanted the Senate to call Bolton and other witnesses. Among them was Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who told a reporter Friday that a Senate trial without witnesses would be “a job only half done.” The criticism was a reminder that Republicans were shutting their ears not just to their political opponents but also to bona fide conservatives who, like most of the House’s witnesses, once helped the president carry out his agenda.
With the exception of Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, who sided with the Democratic minority in favor of testimony, the Republican caucus’ supposed moderates adopted remarkable positions in the service of their votes. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee allowed that House impeachment managers had proved their case and that 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,” but he argued that did not justify the president’s conviction and removal from office. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio similarly acknowledged that the president’s behavior was “wrong and inappropriate” but did not call for any penalty.
The Republican defense of Trump thereby completed an astonishing journey from denying his offense to declaring it insufficiently proven to admitting it but judging it inconsequential. The Senate has issued an open invitation to Trump and future presidents to solicit foreign assistance in U.S. elections, leverage U.S. policy and public money to advance that goal, subvert the interests of the nation and its allies, and obstruct every attempt to investigate or hold him accountable.