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.
gotta get a lower rating #20 again, that way mitch can soak up some more
#2? They won’t be happy until America is last.
As if Trump could fire Mitch. Let's face it, Mitch had Trump by the nads.
In this world EVIL WILL always win until God intervenes, which is seldom and situations at His choosing, or until Jesus comes back and rules with an iron fist for a millennium! Other than that we are just going to have to grin and bear an existence with an evil stalinists type power governing the helpless...😢 Our first and second amendments by years end will vanish in the middle of the night while America is asleep!
This is all gaslighting. From the Dem operative/reporter and the GOP Senate. After certifying the stolen electoin the GOP Senate will now pose as supporters of POTUS to defeat this faux impeachment. China Mitch will allow the usual suspects to make a pinata out of POTUS while ensuring it is defeated.
Sadly, many weak and prone to surrender GOP voters will be duped by the GOP here. This is why they play these swamp games.
This is going to be like a really really effed up Home Owners’ Association meeting.
The Republican Party is going to be a very lonely place for people like McConnell, Romney, Sasse, and Cheney...
I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a headline on (gasp), FNC. It said something to the effect that McConnell was being investigated for his business dealings. Have not seen/heard/read anything since I saw that headline hours ago
We’ll see how Mitch really votes....
Sasse doesn’t have the balls to legitimately run for POTUS in 2024. He may run as a fake candidate so he can raise money but no way does he show up in Trump country to campaign. Ever.
Knowing FR, in few short years, one will be a 'troll' and a 'Rat supporter' for not supporting the next wishy-washy Chinese Republicant nominee.
Are they really that stupid? Why yes, yes they are.
Where do The people of Kentucky stand on Mitch impeaching Trump?
Everyone here has been right on various topics over the years. This hindsight 20/20 crap is so childish.
Hindsight? We’ve known for years that the GOP Senate supported the Mueller coup even after he hired Obama and Hillary’s lawyers. Many facts were public knowledge. Only the willfully blind and sunshine pumpers could not deduce the bipartisan nature of the 4 year long coup against POTUS.
McConnell and others have destroyed the Republican Party - I will not support the current party ever again.
China Mitch is fine with that. He doesn’t want a Trumpian GOP. He’d rather lose. We must grant him his death wish now.
And end in acquittal as before. Are the Dems going to get 67 votes? Not in a million years.
Total and complete waste of time.
In 2006 Mitch voted wiith Killer Teddy Kennedy for full amnesty
Fits with yhe Ford over Regan endorsement
Mitch is not wanting to tell people about his self. He got money from dominion and likely the Chinese.
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