I am now predicting that the impeachment vote does not pass the in the House. The Democrats can’t afford to have witnesses questioned under oath in a fair trial in the Senate.
What makes you assume the trial will be fair in the Senate? The GOP Senate has not been supportive of President Trump in his battle against the coup for 3 years. In fact the GOP Senate blocked the outstanding Ratcliffe for DNI. Graham has already made rumblings about picking the witnesses for POTUS. I’m just not counting my chickens on a Senate trial. McConnell will find a way to do the absolute minimum in support of POTUS. Guaranteed.
The Republicans will fight as if their own personal careers depend on it, because they do.
By fair I mean out of the complete control of the democrats. The constitution is a little more clear on what the trial is supposed to look like and I assume the Republican Senators will want to look magnanimous and show just how much they are like a regular court. They will have to give the President some amount of time to present a defense. That is what the democrats can't have. They don't want to give the President any time to present his case.
The trial will have better ratings than the hearing because we love TV shows about trials. Everyone gets to watch and judge. In a trial anything can happen. Yes there may be republican Senators working behind the scenes to hurt the President. But the Chief Justice could allow far ranging witnesses such as Strok or Page.
This is the problem with a trial, it's open ended, everyone gets their shot. Too much to control. You can't guarantee that it will go bad for President. So if you're a democrat in the house you say why do we need to take the chance? We have gotten all the mileage we are going to get. I can run campaign ads at how sneaky the President is, everyone knew he was doing wrong but he carefully worded things to the right people to avoid going to jail. He had that evil Rudy Guilliani do his dirty work for him so we couldn't catch him even though all our witnesses knew what he was up to. They just couldn't find the smoking gun.
If I were the democrats I'd make it a close vote. Then have the no voting democrats go on TV and trash the President and the Republicans in the Senate. How you weren't going to give them a forum so they could flaunt their corruption blah, blah, blah.