Posted on 01/18/2021 6:04:22 AM PST by RandFan
Republican senators are wrestling over what they want their party’s future relationship with Donald Trump to be after he leaves office on Wednesday.
Faced with a deeply divided Senate Republican conference, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is giving his colleagues free rein to vote their conscience when the Senate tries Trump on charges that he incited an insurrection.
McConnell is telling colleagues that he himself hasn’t decided whether to vote to convict Trump on a House-passed article of impeachment and associates describe the GOP leader “as furious” over that attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
The New York Times reported that McConnell has told associates that he sees the impeachment effort as a way for the Republican Party to break with Trump, although the GOP leader later discounted what he called “speculation” in the press.
A Senate vote to convict Trump would need at least 17 Republican votes to be successful, if all 50 Democratic senators vote to convict. A second vote could be held to prevent Trump from running for office again. That would require a simple Senate majority.
While a good number of Republican senators would like to break free of what they see as the destabilizing and often erratic leadership of Trump, Republican strategists and aides warn there is a serious political risk to banning him from future political office.
“I don’t think it’s an easy call, but I think there would be a lot more Republican support evident if it were not linked to the Democrats’ clear desire to prevent him from running for office ever again,” said Vin Weber, a Republican strategist. “That’s the real question politically.
“A lot of people in both parties who want Trump just gone think, ‘That’s good, we’ll just get rid of Trump. He can’t run again,’” he added.
But he cautioned the “hard-core Trump people, which probably means a majority of the Republican voters, still view Trump as their leader [and] they view the election as stolen.”
“If we take the step of banning Trump from running again, they’re not going to say anything’s been stolen. They’re simply going to say the power structure of the country has prevented our leader from running again and they’ll be right,” he added. “You’ve created an impossible situation in terms of trying to soften the divisions a little bit in the country and soften the vote on the hard-core pro-Trump side.”
Some Republicans are already using that as a justification to oppose impeachment.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), an influential member of the Senate GOP conference who led the effort to put together a Republican police-reform bill last year, warned that impeaching Trump would undercut efforts to promote national unity after the strife of 2020.
“An impeachment vote will only lead to more hate and a deeply fractured nation,” he said, arguing that convicting Trump would “fly in direct opposition to what President-elect Joe Biden has been calling for all year.”
At the same time, outrage has mounted within the Senate Republican Conference as news details about last week’s attack on Congress emerge.
Federal prosecutors said in a court filing Friday that they had “strong evidence” the rioters who breached the Capitol intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials,” including Vice President Mike Pence.
That revelation sparked outrage from Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an influential conservative who may run for president in 2024.
“These men weren’t drunks who got rowdy — they were terrorists attacking this country’s constitutionally-mandated transfer of power. They failed, but they came dangerously close to starting a bloody constitutional crisis. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Sasse said in a statement.
Trump’s plummeting popularity, his words of encouragement to a crowd of supporters before the storming of the Capitol last week and his debunked and unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen has GOP senators looking for a way to decisively break with the outgoing president.
A small group of Republican senators has signaled they are open to voting to convict Trump for inciting the crowd.
“I believe that this president has committed an impeachable offense through his words on the sixth of January, and leading up to the sixth of January, when he was not honest to the American people about the election and the election results,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told KTUU, an Alaskan news channel.
Sasse, Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have also either said Trump committed impeachable offenses or blamed him for inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol.
But Republican aides say Democrats won’t get 17 GOP senators to vote to convict Trump after he leaves office.
“It’s an opportunity to purge Trump, yes. I don’t know there are 17 votes to do so. This is more of an opportunity for the Democrats to continue to try to destroy the Republican Party. What the Democrats have very successfully done is politicize impeachment with no hearings, no process in the House,” said a Senate GOP aide.
The aide predicted that Trump’s legal team will respond on the Senate floor with statements and videos by Democratic politicians urging their supporters to “fight” and expressing sympathy to the Black Lives Matter protests last year, which resulted in property destruction and deaths in several cities.
Already Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has been called on by several Democratic colleagues to resign because if his role in opposing the final tally of electoral votes for Biden, is pointing to Democrats’ support for the summer protests.
Some Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) will try to sidestep the question of whether Trump committed impeachable offenses by arguing that impeachment does not apply to a private citizen, which is what Trump will be by the time the Senate trial begins.
“The Founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove officeholders from public office—not an inquest against private citizens,” he said in a statement.
There’s also growing uncertainty whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will even send the House-passed article of impeachment to the Senate this month as doing so would force a trial to begin immediately, which would stall work on the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal Biden unveiled Thursday and hang up confirmation of his Cabinet nominees.
The Republican aide said Republicans are not likely to give Democrats consent to work on a coronavirus relief bill and confirm Biden’s nominees while the trial is going on, which means the incoming president’s agenda could be stalled for weeks.
Some Democrats are already balking at putting the Senate on pause for as long two weeks to a month to conduct an impeachment trial.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), an influential centrist, says holding a Senate trial after Trump leaves office “doesn’t make any common sense whatsoever.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Friday his priority is to move a relief package and Biden’s nominees before holding a trial to convict an ex-president.
The Senate trial could not begin before 1 p.m. on Jan. 20, after Trump is out of office, because the upper chamber is in a recess until Tuesday.
“He’s emboldened to do what he thinks is right,”
What’s right for McConnell, i.e., big payoffs from lobbyists and from China, isn’t necessarily what’s right for Americans. So he’s doing what he thinks is right — for HIM.
What these idiots don’t realize is that it isn’t “Trumpism” that embodies Trumps supporters, it’s support for a Constitutional Republic, limited government, economic freedom from undue regulation, secure borders, balanced budgets etc.
“You say that like you’re not a Trump supporter.”
I warned Trump supporters about Mitch.
“Many Freepers USED to think George Bush was a ‘good guy’.”
Mitch was criticizing Trump while he was President to the media and hardly endorsed him in 2016.
“MITCH MCCONELL WANTS TO PURGE TRUMP FROM THE PARTY FOR GOOD”
Sort of like slicing your own wrists and watching your blood run out.
Go ahead Mitch...show us just how stupid you are.
Pretty much all people think they are doing the right thing at that particular time. Even a drunk taking another drink. Dr. Evil, who is just “evil on purpose” is a fictional Character. People always justify their actions as good, if only in a “end justifies the means” sort of way.
I believe this about all politicians, and even folks like Hitler.
McConnell won’t run for reelection. He’ll retire at the end of his term.
...something he should’ve done many years ago.
Something the voters should have done many years ago.
President Trump is the head of the Republican Party until another Republican wins the Presidency. There is nothing McConnell can do to change that.
L
Why are we even wasting out time talking about a Senate trial? It’s not going to happen. When is this going to happen? The GOP would rather it not happen so that they can claim they would have taken action of some sort. Politicians love taking about what they would have done or not done. Kabuki theater at It’s finest.
It is amazing the YOU and other non-Trump supporters think Trump supporters thought McConnell was an ally of Trump's. You don't think Trump supporters saw through the phony Obamacare vote? Trump had to bring in Mitch's wife as SOT just so he could move his agenda through the Senate.
You probably think you Grand Old Party is safe now. Don't count on it. Plan for the primaries.
McConnell and others have destroyed the Republican Party - I will not support the current party ever again.
Faced with a deeply divided Senate Republican conference, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is giving his colleagues free rein to vote their conscience when the Senate tries Trump on charges that he incited an insurrection.
____________
That ANY person elected by the “folks at home” might be “reined in” to doing the leadership’s bidding is WRONG!
It may be the way it’s been, but that type of control over the members of either house is atrocious. This is why neither house just VOTES until they know HOW the vote will go.
OUR Elected representatives are NOT representing US - they are doing as told by the leaders - NOT exactly the way our founders figured it would go.
“He’s emboldened to do what he thinks is right...”
If doing what is right has ever been McConnell’s goal, it has been a long, long, time. He is motivated only by successfully implementing his agenda. If it corresponds with the interest of the nation, it is accidental.
[Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an influential conservative]
“...The GOP has become commie lite. They would sell out the country just as fast as the left....”
Turtle is part of the GOPe arm of the UniParty.
GOPe = DNC = UniParty = DS = Communists.
Yeah. They may all wear different hats, they all spout off different lies that their constituencies wants to hear, but the bottom line is; they’ve ALL got the same goals and agendas. Hint: and it ain’t to represent their constituent base.
Everyone here has been right on various topics over the years. This hindsight 20/20 crap is so childish.
Mitch McConnell is. in many ways, as compromised as Joe Biden, and for the same reasons. Much of his accumulated wealth is built up from personal contacts within the hierarchy of the ruling factions of the Chinese Communist Party, working through his spouse, Elizabeth Chao.
Elizabeth Chao is the daughter of shipping magnate James S.C. Chao. He founded Foremost Maritime Corporation, in Taipei, Taiwan, and emigrated to the US in the late 1950’s bringing his family, including daughter Elizabeth in the early 1960’s. The family became naturalized US citizens, and engaged in Republican politics from early on. But business being business, the Foremost Group became involved in dealing with the Communist Chinese shipbuilding in various mainland shipyards, which happen to be the largest and best bargain in the business. Getting several breaks on the construction of new shipping, all their business was directed there, but the Chinese Communist Party also extracts additional promises and obligations in exchange for their “favorable” deals. So Mitch McConnell is pulled insidiously and perhaps irrevocably into the reliance on the good graces of Xi Jining. Can’t afford to cross your business partners, you know.
But here comes Donald J. Trump, who recognizes a lopsided deal immediately, then proceeds to give the Chinese Communist Party a pretty severe drubbing. This greatly alarms Mitch McConnell, who sees an encroaching negative effect on his bottom line, because now, quite suddenly, Foremost Group no longer gets such favorable terms from the Chinese shipbuilders and port facilities.
Follow the money.
“They failed, but they came dangerously close to starting a bloody constitutional crisis. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
WHAT A CANDY-ASSED PANSY!
I doubt there is one ball’s worth of testosterone in the entire US Senate!
“Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an influential conservative who may run for president in 2024” is just an echo chamber for AOC. If he runs, he’ll draw fewer votes than Jeb....
McConnel thinks that if Trump goes away, then China goes away...
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