Senate Republicans Will Pay a Price for Helping Trump Conceal Evidence

[babylonsister]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/impeachment-senate-evidence-testimony-trial-mcconnell-trump-ukraine.html


Senate Republicans Will Pay a Price for Helping Trump Conceal Evidence
By Jonathan Chait


The first day of President Trump’s impeachment trial centered on the rules of evidence. Democrats want to admit documents and testimony the administration has blocked, and Republicans want to, well, block them. So far, Mitch McConnell is winning. He held his entire caucus together in a series of votes to block any new evidence from being admitted before the trial begins.

But the victory is Pyrrhic. Given that a vote to remove is almost inconceivable — Trump could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and all that — the trial is fundamentally an exercise in shaping public opinion about Donald Trump and his abuses of power. By voting to withhold evidence, Republicans are placing themselves in the unpopular position of abetting a cover-up.

snip//

The Democratic case is fairly clear: The evidence they managed to obtain proves Trump’s guilt, but if Republicans aren’t satisfied, they should examine the rest of the evidence. The Republican case for withholding it is absurd. McConnell has attacked the House case as a “shoddy work product” and “the most rushed, least thorough and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history,” while blocking all efforts to broaden it. If the House has indeed failed to do its job, shouldn’t the Senate correct the error? Instead, McConnell insists the House has done a rushed and shoddy job of collecting the evidence, and therefore the Senate must not collect any more. Claiming the House has failed to do its job, he now insists the Senate must likewise fail to do its job.

Whatever value this position has to the GOP, it is not a political asset. Polls show some three-quarters of the public want the Senate to admit new evidence. Trump’s own rhetoric hints at the vulnerability. Interviewed by reporters at Davos, Trump claimed he would like former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, but, “I’ll leave that to the Senate.” Feigning transparency while pretending the decision is out of his hands is a familiar Trump gambit. He repeatedly generated headlines quoting his alleged desire to testify to Robert Mueller under oath (“Trump says he is willing to testify under oath in U.S.-Russia probe”; “Trump says he still ‘would like to’ testify before Mueller”) with the fine print buried lower (“He later said that the decision to talk to Mueller would be ‘subject to my lawyers’ but that he personally would like to do it”). With Mueller, Trump was hiding from the truth and foisting it on his lawyers. Now he is foisting it on Senate Republicans.

McConnell has held his handful of wavering members together by delaying any decision on new evidence. It is obviously not a choice he relishes. The impeachment trial is an exercise in displaying the Republican Party’s institutional culpability in Trump’s contempt for the rule of law. At some point, they will have to decide to damn the president or to damn themselves.

[Kaiserguy]

1. You would hope so

however given what the base of the Republican party is like they will keep right on voting no matter how dishonest their Republican Senator turns out to be. Our best hope is that the Independent voter is turn off by the Republicans dishonesty.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

2. Republicans have boxed themselves into a corner.

As they chide the House, whiler acting complicit in the blocking of key witnesses and documents. Repubs want it both ways.

But, the American people are watching this unfold. They want the truth be told. It will cost Republicans in the end.