The verdict is in: The Senate will refuse to hear witnesses or request documentary evidence.
It’s worth pointing out that the party that just voted to exclude witnesses from the Senate Trial of Donald J. Trump is the party that forced Monica Lewinsky to testify via video during the Senate trial about intensely embarrassing personal details to embarrass a Democratic president.
The vote to exclude witnesses, amazingly enough, happened after Lev Parnas’s lawyer wrote to Mitch McConnell to tell him that:
The decision to exclude witnesses also happened after the New York Times broke this news:
Asha Rangappa pointed out the ethical problem with Cipolloni, who was also in the room, representing Trump before the Senate:
What happened is this: McConnell made a calculation. He knows what is in the excluded evidence and he determined that allowing evidence would be more damaging than conducting a sham trial. This tells you the evidence is devastating.
McConnell prefers to deal with the devastating drip-drip in the media because the GOP has a well-oiled media-propaganda loop.
I will make a prediction: The House will continue investigating. But instead of impeaching, they will vote to censure the president, adding that they can’t impeach because the corrupt Senate will just hold another sham trial. Censure takes only a majority vote.
Imagine the House announcing something like: “We have Trump’s taxes and evidence that Trump
- lied about his wealth,
- he is entirely propped up by Russian money,
- and his wealth comes from laundering money for Russian oligarchs
We censure him because we know the Senate will cover it up and conduct another sham trial.
The House then publishes the evidence along with the notice of censure and says, “The Senate says we can’t impeach in an election year. The Senate says that they can exclude evidence in a trial. So here, American people. You decide. Here are his taxes. Go at it.”
No surprise, when it was clear that the Senate Republicans would vote to block witnesses and documentary evidence, there were cries that American democracy was dead and we were all doomed.
This isn’t a time to panic. It’s time to get busy. What happens in November depends on what people do today.
Nobody realistically expected the GOP to convict and remove Trump. The goal was for the truth to come out. And the truth is coming out. Acquitting without witnesses means everything that will comes out between now and November will be (rightly) cast as part of the GOP coverup:
Think what was accomplished by this process. If not for the Whistleblower, Trump’s plan would have worked. Zelensky would have announced an investigation into the Bidens, and Trump would have hammered this, helped by disinformation campaigns.
As a result of the impeachment process, Trump’s caper, and the full implications, are on full display for everyone to see.
One accomplishment of the Mueller Report is that we know much more than we did in 2016 about how these tactics work. Really, there are not all that many tricks in the playbook, and we’ve now seen them all.
McConnell hopes people will forget before November. People won’t forget:
Sometimes I think American politics is unfolding as it should. How many more people are like Timmy:
Expect the despair-mongers to be out in droves after the acquittal. They thrive on opportunities to stir you to rage.
The panic and despair we are comes partly from a mistake in thinking. I get it. I made the mistake myself. I thought history was on certain trajectory, and after the breakthroughs of the previous generations, our culture would naturally keep growing more inclusive. I thought the story was written.
Timothy Snyder talks about what happens when such a story “breaks.”
People panic when the story breaks. We leap from “We don’t have to do anything!” to “There is nothing we can do! This is all new!”
Both are a kind of helplessness. In fact, (as Snyder explains very eloquently) what happens tomorrow is the result of what real people do today.
People born after the Civil Rights and women’s rights movement inherited an expanding democracy. For the first time in America’s history, we were moving toward a true liberal democracy.
People who inherit something often think they’re entitled, and don’t have to work for it. Nope. We have to work for it. Every day, every year, every generation.
From Coretta Scott King: “Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”
Feeling despair? See my FAQs.
