Senate Television via AP
Chief Justice John Roberts swears in members of the Senate for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, January 16, 2020.
The third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history will begin on Tuesday. Donald Trump stands accused of illegally withholding congressionally appropriated funds bound for Ukraine on the condition that it open an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of a Trump political rival, and his board membership on Ukrainian gas concern Burisma.
The trial is a strange beast, because everyone already knows the facts, the measure of Trump’s guilt, the process that will be undertaken in the Senate, and the outcome. That’s particularly true if you’ve been following the Prospect. Here’s what to read to get you up to date.
As Paul Starr noted in September, Democrats had little choice but to do their constitutional duty, regardless of the stonewall they would run up against with the Senate Republican majority. Attempting to employ a foreign power to influence an election was too great an offense, Starr wrote. Writing fellow Brittany Gibson took the bombshell whistleblower report that kicked off the drama to take a deeper look at government whistleblowers more generally. “While this administration has acted in unprecedented ways, ignoring the norms set before them, the accusations of treason are merely a Trumpian escalation of President Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers,” Gibson wrote.
As for whether Ukraine-gate would sway Republicans’ sense of morality and obligation to country, Harold Meyerson put a rest to that on October 1. This would not be like 1974, when Republicans trekked to the White House to tell Nixon he would have to resign lest he be removed. “There are a host of explanations for why and how Republicans have cocooned themselves from reality, not least the realignment of Southern whites into the GOP, which pushed the party to embrace a much more hard-right politics that drove many moderates into the Democrats’ ranks,” Meyerson wrote. “If Trump is polling at twice Nixon’s final-days level, and if congressional Republicans still sing Trump’s praises for fear of estranging their counterfactually oriented base, Fox and its ilk are substantially to blame.”
That didn’t make Democrats’ actions on impeachment meaningless. Prospect writers consistently pushed for a broader inquiry into Trump administration lawlessness. Alexander Sammon cited Henry Kissinger’s ability to flourish post-Nixon as a reason to lay all the facts on the table so nobody could be immune to them. And Jeff Faux also demanded that Democrats follow the trail of evidence wherever it leads.
Continued revelations on the Ukraine saga even after the House impeachment vote did raise hopes of ongoing investigation, which could go well beyond Ukraine, and toward a wide-ranging exploration of corruption. By the end of the House process, I found the whole saga to be rather limp. “The circumscribed Ukraine scandal, a tidy synecdoche of abuse of power, taught little,” I wrote. “The tale could be told simply enough through a few Foreign Service officials, providing a mere hint of the broader kleptocracy at play. One problem with this simplicity is that it’s hard to captivate the nation once you’ve explained the first time: The rest becomes argument for argument’s sake.”
One bit of comic relief is that Republican leaps of logic and lurches toward conspiracy theories in justifying the president’s actions have been ably covered by Paul Waldman. “Donald Trump is a harsh master; he demands not only absolute devotion and humiliating public displays of lickspittlery but a limitless moral and rhetorical flexibility,” Waldman wrote.
Now we’re at the end of the road: the trial, where senators will sit in silence—under penalty of imprisonment—and three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination will be stuck in Washington to wordlessly watch things play out. That play will feature sparring between House impeachment managers and—God help us —Ken Starr and Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz. One positive, as I pointed out, is that this will give Senate Republicans less time to wave through Trump’s judges, which has been practically their only role in the past year.
Brittany Gibson laid out precisely how the impeachment trial will work, and who will hold the whip hand. “With the support of his caucus, [Mitch McConnell] can execute the creative interpretations of Senate procedure for which he is well known,” Gibson wrote. “This will dramatically affect how the impeachment trial is conducted.” This granular breakdown of how things will play out is must reading heading into the trial.
Four Senate Republicans could break McConnell’s vice grip on the trial process by voting with Democrats on procedural matters. Gabrielle Gurley targeted Mitt Romney as one Republican with choices to make.
Finally, Bob Kuttner took a broad look at how the trial will affect senators, particularly vulnerable Republicans who will face extreme pressure to acquit Trump: “The Senate trial does play to Democratic advantage in one important way. It improves the Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate.”
The Prospect will be weighing in on the trial periodically as developments ensue. The links here should catch you up on the prelude. Happy reading, and we’ll see you Tuesday.