Horowitz: Impeachment - State of Play as the Trial Begins

Horowitz: Impeachment - State of Play as the Trial Begins

As the impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins in the US Senate today, Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s use of Senator David Perdue (R-GA) to float a trial balloon over the weekend, saying that the majority leader was considering a compressed trial schedule, provides a window into the current state of play.  Perdue told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press this past Sunday that McConnell was considering limiting the presentations of the case to only 2 days for each side. He would provide 24 hours to each side, which would mean by definition extended 12 hour days.  This would accomplish the goal of limiting the number of news cycles in which the trial would receive news coverage.

Senator McConnell, a shrewd and smart politician, knows the established fact pattern of President Trump holding up nearly $400 of needed military aid to an ally defending themselves against our adversary, Russia, in order to use it as leverage to generate an investigation into a political opponent is bad for the president and for the majority leader’s efforts to retain Republican control of the Senate in the 2020 election. He knows that the less time spent on saturation level coverage of the president’s actions or his attorneys’ attempts to defend the indefensible, the better for Republicans.

Reinforcing McConnell’s sound political instincts is that the news that has unfolded since President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives right before Christmas has been nearly uniformly bad for the president. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report calling the president’s holding up of military aid to Ukraine illegal.  The House Intelligence Committee released a trove of documents and emails provided by Lev Parnas, one of the key members of the motley crew Rudy Giuliani assembled to carry out the president’s unsavory mission in Ukraine,  Parnas added his own icing on the cake by doing a lengthy interview with Rachel Maddow, followed up by other media interviews, in which he pointed the finger directly at the president and at least some of his claims can be verified by documentary evidence.

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Two other recent developments may turn out to be even more damaging.  It is now confirmed that the order to hold up the military aid to Ukraine that was mandated by Congress and already cleared by the Pentagon, happened 90 minutes after President Trump’s now-infamous phone call with President of Ukraine Zelensky.  And former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is known to be highly critical of Trump’s Ukraine actions, announced that if subpoenaed he would testify, making it more likely that witnesses will be called.

 Nor will Mr. McConnell and other savvy Republicans be encouraged by the threadbare constitutional arguments made by new member of the president’s legal team Alan Dershowitz over the weekend as he blanketed the airwaves.  His bizarre claim that he was representing the constitution and not President Trump fell flat and made him seem disingenuous. More importantly, his argument that “abuse of power,” particularly as it applies to this particular set of facts, is not a constitutionally permissible grounds for impeachment is so far out of the mainstream and so willfully misinterprets the founding fathers, it is nearly laughable.  As Laurence Tribe, a far more respected constitutional expert, wrote in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, “The related suggestion that, even if some noncriminal offenses might be impeachable, “abuse of power” is not among them is particularly strange. No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it. The suggestion turns the impeachment power on its head.”

In all likelihood, however, none of these developments nor any damaging testimony at trial is likely to change the ultimate outcome.  Conviction requires a 2//3 majority in the Senate and that means the votes of at least 20 Republican Senators. At this moment, there appears to be the 4 Republican votes necessary to reach the simple majority required to call witnesses and subpoena documents, but whether there is even one Republican vote for removal remains an open question.

Still, for an unpopular president who barring a strong third party or independent candidate needs to expand--not simply maintain and excite-his base, the next few weeks are likely to make that already daunting task even harder.  Despite the bravado you hear from the president and his media enablers, the truly politically savvy people around him know that Senator McConnell is right. The less time spent on impeachment, the better for Donald J. Trump.

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.