Senate Television via AP
In the cadence of one of those four Passover questions, California Democrat Adam Schiff asked, “Why should this trial be different from any other trial?”
For many decades, Republicans have warned Americans about the perils of socialism, liberalism, progressivism, and a host of other isms. But at least for the past quarter-century, that’s not been the ism they actually fear most.
The essence of modern Republicanism is its opposition to empiricism, and the reductio ad absurdum of that belief is now on plain view to their compatriots. By refusing to have the Senate call witnesses or subpoena documents in the impeachment trial of President Trump, Republicans have elevated their allergy to facts into a cancer eating away at the people’s power to know what their government is doing and at their representatives’ power to impeach and remove public officials when their actions amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Tuesday’s opening debate on the rules under which the Senate will try Trump could not have made this any clearer. Republican Leader Mitch McConnell put forth rules that would effectively prohibit the calling of witnesses and the subpoenaing of documents.
California Democrat Adam Schiff, who heads the team of House managers, spoke for nearly an hour on why a trial without witnesses or documents fell radically short of what most Americans think of as a trial. In the cadence of one of those four Passover questions, he asked, “Why should this trial be different from any other trial?” Or, indeed, any of the 15 impeachment trials that the Senate has conducted since first convening in 1789? Every one of those trials, Schiff made clear, including the two of presidents (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton), had heard from witnesses—40 in Johnson’s case, three in Clinton’s, with the average for all those trials coming to 33. Senate rules, Schiff continued, made clear that the Senate can compel witnesses to appear for routine hearings, in which the Senate’s power is far less than it is for impeachment hearings.
To this argument, the president’s attorneys countered that it was some dereliction of duty for the prosecutors to come before the Senate and request still more testimony. Of course, one reason they’re requesting more testimony is that the president has refused to allow many key witnesses to appear before the House—and that new evidence has been revealed in the past weeks of the president’s attempts to bully Ukraine into intervening in the upcoming presidential election by way of smearing Joe Biden. The other reason they’re requesting new testimony is that, as in every previous impeachment trial, the Senate needs to make its decision based a clear and complete presentation of the facts—and the president has thus far kept a lid on what the congress and the public can know.
To the extent that the president’s attorneys made any argument at all, that was it—that requesting witnesses and documents reflected poorly on the prosecutors. The rest of their time, the two lead Trump attorneys—Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow—spoke much as their client speaks, in disconnected, not always coherent bursts of attack on Trump’s prosecutors, Schiff in particular, often stopping in mid-sentence to veer to an entirely new attack as the spirit moved them. What they didn’t do was actually defend the practice of holding a trial without witnesses or more adequate documentary evidence. Nor did they have to in order to persuade Republican senators, who voted in lockstep to proceed without either (at least until after both sides have made their case, at which time, they’ll vote to reject evidence yet again).
In covering the day’s breaking news, the networks were gulled into making vastly too much of a supposed McConnell “concession” to Maine’s Susan Collins and other Republican “moderates.” Just before he presented his proposed rules to the Senate, McConnell changed the text so that the two 12-hour sessions for attorney arguments were rearranged into three 8-hour sessions—thereby exempting Republicans from the charge that they sought to conduct the trial at the witching hour, when no one would be watching. By so doing, McConnell ensured that he’d keep Collins and her ilk voting the party line on excluding witnesses and new documentary evidence, which is all, of course, that really matters. If Collins thinks that persuading McConnell to make this change strengthens her re-election prospects, she’s in even more trouble than we thought.
We really shouldn’t be surprised that Senate Republicans are unanimous in trying Trump without subjecting themselves to the affront of hearing evidence. At least since the buildup to the Iraqi War, when officials in George W. Bush’s administration dismissed arguments against the war and other Bush policies for being “reality-based,” empiricism has been in ill repute in mainstream Republican thought and action. Were it not, Trump couldn’t command nearly universal support from the GOP rank-and-file when proclaiming climate change a hoax, nor could Republicans more mainstream than Trump get away with suppressing voter turnout by invoking the specter of actually non-existent voter fraud. In this, Republican leaders are greatly aided by rightwing media like Fox News, where empirically based analysis and reporting is a firing offense.
What made the first day of Senate deliberations interesting, if not edifying, was its unusually direct confrontation between these two worlds, that of fact and that of distraction. Schiff and his colleague Zoe Lofgren adduced historic precedent, constitutional language and court interpretation thereof, and the record of testimony and evasion the nation has seen to this point in arguing for a normal evidentiary trial. Neither Cipollone nor Sekulow really argued about the desirability, or lack thereof, of factual presentation, contenting themselves with attacks on the House Democrats. If there are any fans of asymmetric warfare, as such, they should be overjoyed. If there are any Americans still on the fence as to whether Trump committed the high crime of abuse of power, however, they’re sure to notice that only the prosecution is even talking about that.
