Party lines stick as Trump vote looms
Some GOP senators say president’s actions wrong but not job-costing
WASHINGTON — The Senate was holding to party lines Tuesday in advance of today’s votes on whether to acquit President Donald Trump on two impeachment charges, with just two or three undecided members even considering breaking with their parties.
A leading GOP moderate, Susan Collins of Maine, announced that she will vote to acquit Trump, leaving Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah as the only potential GOP vote to convict Trump of abusing the power of his office and stonewalling Congress.
Collins said “it was wrong” for Trump to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate a political rival, Joe Biden, but that Trump’s conduct, however flawed, does not warrant “the extreme step of immediate removal from office.” Collins voted to acquit former President Bill Clinton at his trial in 1999.
“It is my judgment that except when extraordinary circumstances require a different result, we should entrust to the people the most fundamental decision of a democracy — namely who should lead their country,”
Collins said.
She said Trump’s call to Zelenskiy was “improper and demonstrated very poor judgment,” but there had been “conflicting evidence in the record” about Trump’s motivations. In an interview with CBS, Collins said she believed that Trump had “learned from this case” and will be “much more cautious in the future.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who again slammed the impeachment push of House Democrats as “the most rushed, least fair and least thorough” in history, confirmed that he will vote to acquit Trump.
McConnell undercut an argument that the White House defense team had presented: that impeachment requires the violation of a criminal statue. While McConnell said he did not subscribe to that legal theory, he condemned House Democrats all the same for sailing into “new and dangerous waters.”
“Washington Democrats think President Donald Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor the moment he defeated Hillary Clinton,” McConnell said, referring to the president’s victory in 2016. “That is the original sin of this presidency: that he won and they lost.”
McConnell said the two charges against Trump — that he abused his power and obstructed Congress’ ensuing investigation — are “constitutionally incoherent” and don’t “even approach a case for the first presidential removal in American history.” But he did not address whether Trump’s actions were inappropriate or wrong, as some Senate Republicans have conceded.
The trial is cruising to impeachment tallies that will fall short of even a majority of the GOP-held Senate, much less the two-thirds required to remove Trump from office and install Vice President Mike Pence as president.
The final days of the trial have focused attention on a handful of senators in both parties who were viewed as potential votes to break with their parties. GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska called the president’s actions “shameful and wrong” in a speech late Monday, but she also derided the partisan process. “I cannot vote to convict,” she said, though she also sees blame within the Senate.
“We are part of the problem, as an institution that cannot see beyond the blind political polarization,” Murkowski told reporters after her speech.
Other Republicans, such as Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rob Portman of Ohio, also say Trump’s actions to withhold military aid from Ukraine while pressing Zelenskiy to announce an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter were inappropriate, but fell short of warranting his removal from office, especially in an election year.
“The aid went; the investi- gations did not occur,” Portman said.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who is up for reelection in November, adopted an argument similar to one outlined by Trump’s defense team on its final day of arguments: that to remove the president months before the election would be to subvert the will of voters.
“The House managers’ arguments have argued that the American people cannot be trusted to render their own judgment on this president,” Ernst said. “I reject this premise, the complete distrust of the American people, with everything in my heart.”
Ernst did not directly address the president’s conduct, but jabbed at House Democrats for trying to impose their own conventional wisdom onto how Trump conducted diplomacy. Foreign policy, Ernst said, is an “art, not a science” and “trying to insert a formula into every presidential interaction with a foreign leader,” she continued, was to veer onto a “path towards ineffectiveness.”
Democrat after Democrat took to the Senate floor to announce that they would vote to convict Trump, with senior Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., expressing anger at the conduct of White
House lawyers, who he said performed for an audience of one — meaning Trump — while playing fast and loose with the facts.
“The presentation by White House counsel was characterized by smarminess, smear, elision, outright misstatement, and various dishonest rhetorical tricks that I doubt they would dare to pull before judges,” said Whitehouse.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., pledged to vote to remove Trump and lamented the Senate’s “capitulation,” a turn of events, he said, that surprised him.
“We have allowed a toxic president to infect the Senate and warp its behavior,” Kaine said. “And now the Senate’s refusal to allow a fair trial threatens to spread a broader public anxiety about whether ‘impartial justice’ is a hollow fiction.”
Kaine, known in the Senate for his optimism, sounded a dark warning, insisting that an acquittal would only embolden Trump to engage in worse conduct. “I will not be part of this continual degradation of public trust,” he said.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, perhaps the only Democrat seen as a likely vote to acquit Trump, has floated the idea of censuring Trump instead, though the idea doesn’t seem to be gaining much traction. Sen. Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor and Democrat seeking reelection in strongly pro-Trump Alabama, told reporters he’s likely to announce his vote this morning.
No member of either party had indicated as of late Tuesday a break with party colleagues. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate.
Top Senate Democrat Charles Schumer of New York weighed in immediately after McConnell’s remarks, accusing the Republican leader and his GOP colleagues of sweeping Trump’s misconduct under the rug.
“The administration, its top people and Senate Republicans are all hiding the truth,” Schumer said. The charges are extremely serious. To interfere in an election, to blackmail a foreign country, to interfere in our elections gets at the very core of what our democracy is about.”
Defending the House managers’ case as “compelling,” Schumer denounced Senate Republicans for blocking his motion to consider hearing from additional witnesses — including John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser who had offered to testify — and receive more evidence. The trial they created, he said, “fails the laugh test.”
“The Republicans refused to get the evidence because they were afraid of what it would show,” Schumer said, “and that’s all that needs to be said.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., used his time to read on the Senate floor a question Chief Justice John Roberts had refused to read during the trial because it revealed the name of a person who some claim was the whistleblower whose complaint launched the House’s impeachment inquiry. Paul denies that the question, which is about a conversation between two federal employees, is aimed at naming the whistleblower, noting that it does not use that word. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the two impeachment articles this afternoon. Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press; by Patricia Mazzei and Catie Edmondson of