J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives for a closed meeting with fellow Republicans as he strategizes about the looming impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, at the Capitol in Washington, January 7, 2020.
Has Mitch McConnell outplayed Nancy Pelosi? Speaker Pelosi’s pressure tactic of delaying sending the Senate the formal impeachment resolution failed. McConnell has refused to change the proposed rules to allow calling of witnesses, and he insists he has the votes. And the House will vote on sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate on Wednesday.
On the other hand, several of those votes are soft, and Pelosi’s insistence on calling witnesses has helped put those legislators on the spot. Several GOP senators, including Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, have said they are open to calling witnesses.
With only 53 Republicans in McConnell’s caucus, those four are just enough to deprive McConnell of the majority he needs to approve the rules. Yet all have indicated that they will likely back McConnell on the basic rules and delay the question of whether to call witnesses until later in the trial after the House managers have presented their case.
For Democrats, there is also a be-careful-what-you-wish-for hazard. The longer the trial drags on, the more it eats into primary season. The two progressive front-runners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, desperately need to be in Iowa for the February 3 caucuses and in New Hampshire for the February 11 primary, but they will likely be stuck behind their Senate desks for the next few weeks, not even permitted to show their stuff by asking questions.
The wily McConnell could deliberately drag out the Senate trial to keep the progressives imprisoned in Washington, the better to advantage Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, in the hope of splintering the field. If the early primaries produce no front-runner, and Democratic candidates whack away at each other all the way to the July convention, that plays to Trump’s advantage.
McConnell could even cut a deal with the Trump critics in his party to call some of the witnesses Democrats want to hear from, but also call the Bidens. That would both muddy and further delay the proceedings.
The Senate trial does play to Democratic advantage in one important way. It improves the Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate.
On the other hand, Sanders, Warren, and fellow candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar might take leaves from the Senate proceedings in order to campaign. They could say the Senate trial is rigged and that the paramount goal is to rid the country of Trump, more likely in November. They could even use the Iowa and New Hampshire hustings to ask the questions that they are not permitted to ask from the Senate floor.
Republicans would blast them for failing to do their constitutional duty, but that would not cut any ice with Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic voters. (This would be a good issue to raise at tonight’s Democratic debate.)
The Senate trial does play to Democratic advantage in one important way. It improves the Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate. The Democrats need just three pickups to achieve a 50-50 tie, four if Doug Jones loses his seat in Alabama. No other Democratic incumbents are considered at risk.
Between seven and ten Republican incumbents or Republican-held seats are potentially vulnerable in November, and several are in swing states where polls show that a majority of voters want a fair Senate trial. Republican senators who defend Trump’s assertions that he is beyond the rule of law will have a lot of explaining to do.
The most vulnerable Republicans include Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, all elected in 2014 by narrow margins in a low-turnout year. Other incumbent Republicans vulnerable to hard questions about their support for Trump include Susan Collins of Maine and McConnell himself, whose approval ratings in his home state of Kentucky are around 37 percent.
Politico has reported that polling from Hart Research found that 63 percent of voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina would react unfavorably if their senator voted against calling witnesses or subpoenaing documents. In a good Democratic year, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Steve Daines of Montana, where the current governor and other senator are both Democrats, are also vulnerable.
In other respects, the entire impeachment battle is something of a political wash. Polls show that public opinion has hardly budged on the question of Trump’s removal from office over the past several months. According to 538.com, support for impeachment gradually crept up as the issue gained more attention especially among independents, where it rose from 33.9 percent in late September to 50.3 percent in the most recent poll. Yet opinion is split roughly 50-50 on whether Trump should be removed via a Senate trial.
Historians will long argue over whether Pelosi and the Democrats blundered when they decided on a narrow impeachment resolution based mainly on the easy-to-understand Ukraine scandal, rather than relying on the much richer independent counsel’s report, which provided a road map for a more comprehensive and potentially devastating impeachment. The Democrats might also be faulted for waiting so long to begin, forcing an election-year Senate trial. Yet Pelosi was faced with a caucus that was divided on impeachment until the Ukraine facts came out, and she needed near-unanimity, which she finally got.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton turned out to be a blunder for the Republicans. Voters resented the obsession with Clinton’s sex escapades, and Democrats actually made gains in the 1998 midterms, something that almost never happens in the sixth year of an incumbency. Yet the sheer ickiness of all that was revealed caused Al Gore to distance himself from the tainted Clinton (and from the strong Clinton economy) in 2000, and may have helped George W. Bush win the 2000 election.
The impeachment of Trump, obviously, is about far more consequential issues than Monica Lewinsky. And this year, the presidential election will turn on the substantive issues, not on how impeachment was handled.
Those include Trump’s general contention that he is above the law, his willingness to do the bidding of Russia, and his policies that harm the very people who support him, from his efforts to weaken Social Security and health coverage to his undermining of the rights of workers. More recently, his recklessness on foreign affairs undercuts his claim to be pulling back from endless wars.
To the extent that Trump’s impeachment and Senate trial provide one more venue to demonstrate Trump’s imperiousness and utter unsuitability for office, they advance the goal of his removal, one way or another.
