President Donald Trump.
President Trump has been acquitted of both impeachment charges in the Senate. Reuters. The first charge, that President Trump improperly influenced Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden's alleged corruption was decided by a 52-48 vote with all Democrats voting to convict and one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah joining them. The 2nd charge, obstruction of congress, was on a straight party line vote of 53-47. President Trump joins President Andrew Johnson and President Bill Clinton in surviving partisan impeachment dramas. To date, no President has been removed from office via impeachment.
My Comment:
Just a quick note on the source I used for this post. Reuters came off as incredibly biased against the President, but pretty much every news source I could have used that wasn't explicitly conservative is on this issue. It's like the entire mainstream press is as deranged on President Trump as his political opponents are.
This outcome is somewhat surprising to me. Not the acquittal itself, but the vote total. I had assumed the Mitt Romney was going to betray his voters yet again because he has built a career on doing so. It's no surprised that he voted to convict since he both hates President Trump and the people that voted for him. He's pretty much already a pariah in the Republican Party and only really won in Utah because he is a Mormon. He's also now the most hated man in the Republican Party and has no future in national politics and may not even be able to hold onto his senate seat. I'm fairly sure he was acting out of spite and it was no secret that he hates President Trump for not giving him the Secretary of State job.
What was shocking to me is that no Democrats voted for acquittal. Three Senators in red states had been mentioned as possible swing votes, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Doug Jones of Alabama and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. In the end none of them decided to vote for acquittal.
I hadn't expected Jones to vote the right way even though he is in one of the most vulnerable Senate seats in the country and will almost certainly lose to whoever the candidate is, most likely Jeff Sessions, in 2020. My guess is that he figured he would lose no matter what so he might as well vote with his party. That way when his career as a senator is over he can run for some other seat or maybe go onto the talk show circuit.
Joe Manchin seemed like a more likely candidate. He had been trying to get people to support a censure instead of impeachment, probably in a bid to play both sides. It failed miserably and now he looks vulnerable in his next election. However, since his next election is in 2024 he might have felt insulated for his red state voters wrath.
Kyrsten Sinema is the most shocking to me. I thought for sure she would be reasonable as she had been applauding all night last night at the State of the Union. I was starting to develop a respect for her but that has all been destroyed now. Like Manchin she doesn't come up for a vote until 2024 so I guess she thought it was more important to stick with her party than represent the views of her state.
As for the charges themselves, they were always ridiculous. There is nothing illegal or even morally wrong about investigating someone for corruption even if that person is a political opponent. Joe Biden, at the very least, showed the appearance of corruption when his son was hired by Bursima and furthered that appearance by admitting that he threatened to cut off aid if the government of Ukraine did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company. In short, it was clear that Biden was guilty of the charge that President Trump was attacked with but with no excuse. President Trump is America's top law enforcement official and part of his duties is to investigate corruption. And even if we ignore Joe Biden, the charge was always convoluted, confusing and fairly lame. The average man on the street was confused about what President Trump was even accused of.
The 2nd charge was even dumber. President Trump did not obstruct congress when he tried to offer up a defense. Even though he was never allowed to call witnesses that were in his favor he did have the temerity to refuse handing over documents to the Democrats, which they did not subpoena with the force of law. Charging President Trump for that is a huge overreach of the congressional branch as such a conflict between them and the executive should have and would have been handled by the judicial branch. Taking people to court isn't an impeachable offense and the whole charge was completely ridiculous.
They way that the Democrats handled impeachment was a joke as well. If they have even given President Trump the appearance of a fair trial I think they would have stood a better chance of removing him. But they never even allowed him to call witnesses in his own defense, cross examine witnesses, know who his accusers are or even question if Joe Biden and his son were corrupt or not. With no honest attempt at a fair trial, there was no way the GOP was going to vote against President Trump.
Furthermore the timing was a joke. Though Nancy Pelosi said that the impeachment was a critical time-sensitive matter that absolutely had to be handled quickly, she sat on the impeachment charges for weeks until it was finally given to the senate. By that point everyone was tired of the whole drama and just wanted to move on to something else. Indeed, America was fatigued with the attack against President Trump long before Ukraine even became an issue and had been hearing from Demcorats about impeachment before President-elect Trump had even taken the oath of office. Everyone was so tired of hearing about it that I think there will be bipartisan relief that this mess was finally over.
In the end, impeachment is a political question and politically the Democrats never had anything close to the support they needed. This mess was always a partisan witch hunt and never had anything like bipartisan support. You need 66 votes to remove a president so they needed to present iron clad evidence that even President Trump's supporters would have admitted that Trump did something wrong. They didn't even come close to that standard and, indeed, it seems like they didn't even try.
They just didn't have anything that would convince GOP senators that a President that has around 95 to 98% approval among his party should be removed. These charges were so weak that any senator that did so would be shunned by his party and possibly expelled, which is the likely fate of Mitt Romney. They never presented any kind of evidence that wasn't biased or stupid that President Trump did anything wrong.
This is a huge victory for President Trump and I fully expect him to capitalize on it. He will be able to claim, correctly, that he was acquitted in a partisan witch hunt. Only the betrayal of Mitt Romney and the lack of courage from Sinema, Machin and Jones hurt him, and even that is trivial. I expect a bump in the polls for him and even more donations to come in from supporters who were disgusted by the entire process. I think that it will mirror what happened with President Bill Clinton's impeachment, he will get a boost in the polls and the opposition party will get wiped out in the next election.
As for Democrats, it's been a horrible week for them. Not only was there this, they also had the absolute debacle that was the Iowa Caucus. As of this writing we STILL don't know who won. Add to that the fact that President Trump's State of the Union address was well received while Nancy Pelosi's tearing up of his speech was not and you get a very bad week for the Democratic Party. Indeed, I can't think of a worse week for them in my entire history of following politics.
Furthermore, I think this damages their 2020 chances. The Democrats look weak and split right now and can't be happy with their leadership. Everyone knew that this impeachment effort was going to fail and they have made almost no attempt to do anything else since they regained the house in 2018. A decent portion of their front runner Presidential candidates were tied up in a critical campaign season and they sucked all the air out of the room for building up any hype.
And they have no idea how motivated the GOP base is right now. They are furious that this impeachment happened and are completely disgusted with the Democratic Party. They have shown us nothing but contempt and utter hatred since the election of President Trump and have offered almost nothing for us. Turnout will be high in 2020 and Democrats have only themselves to blame. I'm predicting right now that at the very least President Trump gets reelected and that the GOP holds onto the Senate. And I'm fairly confident that the GOP will take back the house as well.
Finally, I hold out some hope that this country will finally be able to move onto something else for awhile. Since President Trump has been elected news coverage has been dominated by news about him being removed from office. Now that the effort is presumably over the news may finally have to cover something, anything else. A natural pivot would be to the 2020 elections but time will tell how that plays out. Part of me thinks that even though impeachment was a total failure that the Democrats will try again...
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