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.
When your precious GOP implodes and a new party is formed I will enjoy your pain. Your comment is disgusting.
“This is why we CANNOT ‘fix’ the GOP party and need a NEW one.“
I wholly agree.
Should Donald Trump name the formation of a new party, yep - he’d IMMEDIATELY have 70+million supporters.
However, to form a new party takes many more than one man and if I have ANY criticism of Trump, it is his poor ability to hire loyal, reliable people.
I can see this new party getting us all excited and then to find it morph into the GOP again because of the moles.
What do people act like they’re reading real information when they read articles from “The Hill”?
The Republican Party died on January 13, 2021.
I'm an independent Trump voter who welcomes the day when the GOP collapses but congratulations to you nevertheless for jumping to the wrong conclusion!
What ‘party’ would that be? I mean .... Trump supporters don’t identify as ‘Republicans’ anyway!!
I did for about 6 months..possibly a year...but as time went by it got more difficult.
One of the first things he did In the Senate in 1985 was to cozy up with the anti-South Africa militants.
That wasn’t “the shredding.” That’s you opinion of Obama’s birth.
And it doesn’t mean a hill of beans when the Constitution is being shredded.
Then I suggest you work a little harder to write in such a way that your meaning is clear."
Actually if you read thru, Bolton is making the case that they don't have the numbers and highlights the paucity of the charge, including previewing the video that will be played at trial of what Bolton laughably refers to the BLM "protests" that burned cities and looted businesses, carried out by people that look a lot like Karamela.
Not only that, but Trump could and would address the trial directly, in person.
What we're seeing is Cocaine Mitch pointlessly expending his last ammo against PDJT. More importantly, he's showing his own hand of who he and his wife have been all along. He was saving all that to whip and foment a Senate conviction for retaliating for what they knew PDJT needed to do to if he were ever to effectively drain the swamp, that is, DECLASS!
2/3 of the senators would definitely be on board to punish and remove for that!
Yes, PDJT can order the declassification of anything he wants, but there are still agency heads that--when they choose not to sign off on the declass--you know, sources and methods, only after ream-upon-ream is blacked out, etc., yet PDJT goes ahead anyway, we may be darned sure Nancy was set to included it in one or more impeachment article the next day.
And here we have all the piss and vinegar the Turtle had stored up to convict and remove! He's shown to expend it not on DECLASS, but in petty personal vindictiveness. There is yet no predicate for his hate-filled "response."
Gee, Nancy, when it comes out now, are you going to unlawfully try to impeach him a third time on political differences? Are you going to be able to impeach him after you've been removed to Gitmo for many years?
Does Nancy have time? No.
Does Mitch have time? No.
Thirty thousand of our military are on the grounds, ready for far more than crowd control! Military tribunals can effectively deal with the copious, fully declassified (to certain qualified members of the military) evidence that PDJT will be providing shortly (if he hasn't already). The public will get a much lesser-redacted version than (SES) agency and department heads would ever have approved.
When the "dust will have settled"--by April Fools Day--PDJT will have been entirely vindicated for protecting the country from domestic enemies like Mitch, Elaine and Nancy. PDJT will then be declared the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, only in part because Biden's team was, as he said, without misspeaking, "The Most Extensive & Inclusive Voter Fraud Organization in History of American Politics."
If one campaigns earnestly instead of hiding in the basement, a presidential campaign will only commit election fraud because it's been deemed necessary. That rightly should transcend ankle-biting media and naysayers requiring the opposition to prove every single invalid vote and that necessarily "changed the outcome of the election." Unbiased Law Enforcement (now the military, after the others have proved themselves corrupted) has the evidence! That's akin to an attempted murderer being rightly arrested, tried and convicted even though the victim survived the attack.
PDJT didn't have Gitmo renovated for nothing.
The Constitution says natural born citizen.
Obama is not one.
His father was a British subject and a Kenyan national making Obama a British subject and a Kenyan national at birth, wherever he was born.
Obama even admitted this on his “Fight the Smears” website.
Natural born citizens are naturally citizens because they could not be anything else. Born here of citizen parents.
When I associated Mitch & his *country club as something Trump voters should be happy NOT TO BE A PART OF, I thought all but a knuckle dragging moron would get the hint.
Apparently not.
*Please refer to my original comment.
McConnell (and McCarthy, for that matter) is effectively politically neutered unless he has the skills to recruit a Communist Democrat to caucus with the Republicans. (More likely he’ll need two Communist Democrats to come into the light as the RINO Communist Democrat Murkowski is likely to go full-Communist Democrat shortly.
“”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.””
Wrong! We will be lucky if FR still exists within a few years.
Ky Governor up in 2023.
Rand is 2022 and has no intention of retiring.
Their plan is to have Kentucky SoS ease into the Governor's seat in a beat-down over Lil' Andy, then have him either appoint himself to Mitch's spot or run for the open seat.
If Trump wins 2024, Mitch will not retire.
“The Constitution says natural born citizen.”
Yes, this is more boring now than ever.
But it must be repeated here till we’re all bored to death.
Yes, the Constitution is so yesterday........
Yes, keep repeating daily, about Ted Cruz, Rubio, etc.
We can’t hear this failed interpretation of the Constitution daily.
Bore us to death! 🤦♂️
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