The bipartisan moment that produced the USMCA and the defense spending bill ended as abruptly as it appeared. The Senate—both judge and jury in the impeachment trial—seemed likely to be as divided on partisan lines as the House had been. Inevitably, Americans would be subjected to one more tour de force by Mitch McConnell.
On December 19, the day after the House approved the articles of impeachment, McConnell criticized Chuck Schumer for “angrily negotiating through the press” and creating an “impasse” over the rules of the trial. It was remarkably early in the process to proclaim an impasse, but McConnell wanted to send a clear message. “In 1999, all 100 senators agreed on a simple pre-trial resolution that set up a briefing, opening arguments, senators’ questions and a vote on a motion to dismiss,” McConnell recalled, speaking of the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. “Senators reserved all other questions, such as witnesses, until the trial was underway. . . . If 100 senators thought this approach was good enough for President Clinton, it ought to be good enough for President Trump.”1
McConnell also charged that the House “seems to have gotten cold feet and be unsure whether they even want to proceed to a trial.”2 This claim also seemed premature, but it would acquire unexpected force in the weeks that followed. Pelosi, following the counsel of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, decided that she could put pressure on the Senate by delaying the transmittal of the articles of impeachment.3 This gambit could work over the Christmas break but did not seem like a promising long-term strategy. The speaker had crossed the Rubicon by deciding that Trump’s abuse of power required the House to impeach regardless of whether the Senate would convict. But she moved onto thin ice with an effort to somehow control the proceedings of a Senate trial, beyond the responsibility of the House managers to present the case against Trump. McConnell rarely found himself on the moral high ground, but this time Pelosi had given him the opportunity to claim it.
“The House Democrats’ turn is over. It’s the Senate’s turn now—to render sober judgment as the framers envisioned. But we can’t hold a trial without the articles,” McConnell intoned. “If they ever muster the courage to stand behind their slapdash work product and transmit the articles, it will be time for the United States Senate to fulfill our founding purpose.”4 On January 8, McConnell spoke on the Senate floor about the rules for the impeachment trial and his view that the House was encroaching on the Senate’s constitutional role. “There will be no haggling with the House over Senate procedure. There is a reason the Constitution reads the way it does,” McConnell stated. “‘The House has sole power of impeachment.’ They have exercised it. But it is the Senate to whom the founders gave ‘the sole power to try all impeachments.’ End of story.”5
On January 15, Pelosi gave her assent for the articles of impeachment to be transmitted to the Senate, but McConnell was still in attack mode. “We have a 230-year tradition of rejecting purely political impeachments; it died last month,” he said. “Speaker Pelosi and the House have taken our nation down a dangerous road. If the Senate blesses this unprecedented and dangerous House process by agreeing that an incomplete case and a subjective basis is enough to impeach a president, we will almost guarantee the impeachment of every future president of either party. This grave process of last constitutional resort will be watered down into a kind of anti-democratic recall measure that the founding fathers explicitly did not want.”6
The commencement of an impeachment trial was a solemn and historic occasion that certainly warranted the majority leader invoking the Founding Fathers and describing the Senate’s special role and responsibility. But McConnell’s record undercut his moral authority. He had already established himself as the most partisan Senate leader in modern history; more than any other person, McConnell had erased the fundamental difference between the two houses by turning the Senate into a partisan instrument. Moreover, claiming that Pelosi had engineered the first partisan impeachment in history was demonstrably false. The House Republicans, twenty-one years earlier, had impeached President Bill Clinton on a purely partisan basis, for lying about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. At that time, the Senate, led by Republican Trent Lott and Democrat Tom Daschle, stepped up to its responsibility by managing to hold a respectable trial of the blatantly political indictment presented by the House Republicans. In 2020, the two houses would reverse their roles. The House impeached Trump for compelling reasons that were historically justified; the Senate would rush to a partisan, preordained conclusion that Trump should not be removed from office.
The memory of Clinton’s impeachment trial hung over Trump’s in an unfortunate way. If the House Republicans had not impeached Clinton, Trump’s impeachment trial would have been the first in more than 150 years, and only the second in American history. It would be the first serious consideration of impeachment since Richard Nixon in 1974, nearly fifty years earlier. But because of the Clinton experience, commentators fretted that impeachment had now become routinely used, posing a danger to democracy.7 Ultimately that concern did not determine the Senate Republicans’ votes; they were in the tank from the beginning. But it did affect the national debate.
On January 23, 2020, the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump began, with all one hundred senators at their desks and Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. Pelosi had chosen a diverse team of seven managers to present the case, led by Adam Schiff, who was not only the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee but also Pelosi’s most trusted lieutenant. A former California prosecutor, Schiff combined an impressive courtroom style with a mastery of the complex case. Although all seven House managers would present part of the case, Schiff dominated the proceedings, starting with a meticulously reasoned, powerful, two-hour opening statement laying out the facts of the complex matter and clearly showing that Trump had demanded that President Zelensky investigate the Bidens in order to receive the military aid specifically allocated, by a bipartisan Congress, to Ukraine for its defense.
Schiff and the other House managers hammered home the fact that Trump had allowed aid to flow freely to Ukraine until former vice president Biden had emerged as a political threat to his reelection. They refuted the contention by Trump’s defense team that he was simply engaged in typical diplomacy. As Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, noted, it was quite normal to use the promise of a presidential visit or even military aid to obtain diplomatic objectives. What was unacceptable was the nature of the favor that Trump asked of Zelensky: digging up dirt against his principal opponent, influencing the American presidential election. “Trump used his public office—the most sacred office in our country—to try to pursue his private electoral interests,” McFaul tweeted. “That’s the definition of corruption.”8
Schiff urged the Senate to be the tribunal that Alexander Hamilton had envisioned: “a body able to rise above the fray.” The House managers used video clips and PowerPoints to present their case with a riveting clarity to the Senate and the American public. But none of the testimony mattered to the overwhelming majority of the Senate Republicans, who grew increasingly bored and irritated as the trial forced them to give up other important work, such as raising funds for reelection. Lindsey Graham, as usual, was the most vocal. Graham was a resident expert on partisan impeachments, having been one of the House managers who had prosecuted Bill Clinton at his impeachment trial. Now Graham seemed irritated when Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, another House manager and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, showed tapes of his presentation at Clinton’s trial arguing that impeachment did not require a literal crime. When Nadler accused the Senate Republicans of being “complicit” with Trump’s cover-up, Graham shot back in the press. “I’m covering up nothing,” he said. “I’m exposing your hatred of this president to the point you would destroy the institution.”9
The House managers faced a roadblock when it came to the question of calling witnesses to testify directly to the Senate. Chuck Schumer and his fellow Democrat, Doug Jones of Alabama, vigorously argued that hearing from additional witnesses was the sine qua non for a fair trial.10 This became a difficult argument to sustain as the House managers built an extremely powerful case based on video clips from the witnesses they had already interviewed. “I have to say this. Schiff is very, very effective,” James Inhofe, one of the most conservative Republicans, admitted.11 The debate over witnesses focused primarily on John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who had written a yet-to-be-published tell-all memoir reportedly containing a detailed description of Trump’s Ukraine shakedown. No one doubted that Bolton’s testimony would be a major embarrassment for Trump. But the Republicans were determined not to bring Bolton in. They suggested that the price for Bolton’s testimony would be calling Joe Biden and Hunter Biden as witnesses, but their true strategy was not to extend the trial. If no witnesses were called, the trial would end sooner. The Democrats needed to win four Republican votes to prevail. Holding the key votes, as always, were the last standing independent Republicans: Collins, Murkowski, Romney, and Lamar Alexander, probably the most respected Republican, who was serving his final year in the Senate. (He had announced his retirement at age eighty, after a half century of public service.) Alexander’s refusal to state a position lent suspense to the vote, although his long friendship with McConnell made it difficult to envision him breaking ranks on this crucial issue.12
On January 31, the Democrats’ push for more witnesses and documents fell short by a vote of 51–49. Collins and Romney joined the Democrats; Murkowski and Alexander did not. “America will remember this day, unfortunately, where the Senate did not live up to its responsibilities, when the Senate turned away from the truth, and went along with a sham trial,” Schumer said. “If the president is acquitted with no witnesses, no documents, the acquittal will have no value because Americans will know that this trial was not a real trial.”13
Notwithstanding Schumer’s passion, the failure to call witnesses did not make it a sham trial. What made it a sham trial was that forty-nine of the fifty-two Republican senators would never even consider voting to remove Trump from office, regardless of the strength of the case presented. “Will the Senate Republicans ever step in against this president and say, ‘Enough?’” mused Carl Hulse of the New York Times, who had covered the Senate for thirty years. “In pressing inexorably toward their preordained vote of acquittal, Senate Republicans made it clear they see their fortunes and future intertwined with the president’s and are not willing to rock the 2020 boat.”14
This had not always been the case. During the first two years of Trump’s presidency, some Senate Republicans had expressed serious reservations about Trump’s character and conduct in office. But those days were past; Jeff Flake and Bob Corker were gone, and other Republican senators, led by the shameless Graham, were working feverishly to get in lockstep with Trump. “Their party is a cult of personality at this point,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.15
Still, despite the gravitational pull of Trump’s popularity among Republicans, and the pressure from McConnell and Graham, a small but significant group of Senate Republicans understood that Trump had indeed abused his power by shaking down Zelensky. Most of them followed the logic of Lamar Alexander, who seemed to relish being center stage. “It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation,” Alexander said. “But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate. The framers believed there should never, ever be a partisan impeachment. . . . If this shallow, hurried and wholly partisan impeachment were to succeed, it would rip the country apart, pouring gasoline of the fire of cultural divisions that already exist. It would create the weapon of perpetual impeachment to be used against future presidents whenever the House of Representatives is of a different party.”16
Of course, if one party decides that it will oppose impeachment irrespective of the serious political crimes that have been committed, then, by definition, the impeachment is “partisan.” The framers envisioned senators who would have the stature and independence to provide a check against both a renegade president and the misuse of partisan impeachments. There was nothing “shallow” about the impeachment of Donald Trump, which the House managers documented in their compelling case. In fact, Alexander’s use of the term “inappropriate” to describe Trump’s abuse of power was itself “inappropriate.” Lisa Murkowski, in a statement announcing her vote against impeachment, was closer to the mark, calling Trump’s abuse of power “shameful and wrong.”17
Moreover, “let the voters decide” is not an adequate response to a president who repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to solicit foreign interference to help his reelection efforts. In an eloquent closing statement, Schiff warned, “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for the country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. That is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed.”
And Schiff said prophetically, “You may be asking how much damage can he really do in the next several months until the election? A lot. A lot of damage.”18
Leading Republicans professed not to see the danger. “I believe the president has learned from this case,” said Susan Collins. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.” Lamar Alexander shared that view: “Enduring an impeachment is something nobody would like. I would think you would think twice before doing it again.”19
But other Republicans, outside the Senate, saw it differently. “I think [Trump] will just have been given a green light and he will claim not just acquittal but vindication and he can do those things and they can’t impeach him again,” said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman now teaching at Princeton. “I think this is going to empower him to be much bolder. I would expect to see him even more let loose.”20
One Senate Republican stood alone: Mitt Romney. He had only served one year in the Senate, but of course he had special stature as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012. Now he would become the first senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. “The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’” Romney said in explanation of his vote. “The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The President withheld vital military funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The President’s purpose was personal and political. Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust. What he did was not ‘perfect’—no, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interest, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath that I can imagine.”21
As always, McConnell had the last word. One week after the Senate voted against conviction, McConnell went to the Senate floor to offer his reflections on impeachment. “We cannot forget the abuses that fueled this process,” he began, but the abuses he had in mind were not those committed by Donald Trump. “We cannot make light of the dangerous new precedents by President Trump’s opponents in their zeal to impeach at all costs. House Democrats brought their war on institutions to this chamber. From the first evening it was clear the House managers would not even try to persuade a supermajority of Senators, but simply sought to degrade and smear the Senate itself before the nation. . . . The Senate did its job. We protected the long-term future of our Republic. We kept the temporary fires of factionalism from burning through the bedrock of our institutions. . . . But impeachment should never have come to the Senate like this. This most serious constitutional tool should not have been used so lightly, as a political weapon of first resort, as a tool to lash out at the basic bedrock of our institutions because one side did not get its way.”22
The impeachment trial was another partisan triumph for McConnell and another disgrace for the Senate. In 1999, in Clinton’s case, a weakened Senate, already in decline, struggled with the first impeachment in 130 years but rose to the occasion: writing bipartisan rules for the first impeachment trial in a television age; debating and resolving the difficult issue of how many witnesses to have and how to treat Monica Lewinsky; and giving the House managers ample time to present their case without tying up the Senate for months. Continuous bipartisan conversation between leaders Lott and Daschle, but also many other members, marked a good-faith effort to satisfy the nation that justice was done. Nothing like this happened in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. McConnell and Schumer despised each other. There was no return to the historic old Senate chamber for a heart-to-heart meeting of all the senators. The feuding factions remained feuding factions. The impeachment trial did not ease the partisan divide; it amplified it.
Was there a better way forward? Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat from perhaps the strongest Trump state, floated the idea of censuring Trump, rather than voting on whether to convict. “I do believe a bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump for his action in this matter. Censure would allow this body to unite across party lines,” Manchin said. “Censure would allow a bipartisan statement condemning his unacceptable behavior in the strongest terms.”23 During the Clinton trial, a handful of senators had looked at alternatives, including censure, that could have prevented votes on the three articles of impeachment that the House had approved against Clinton. Based on the history of the impeachment clause, the senators had concluded that a vote on each article of impeachment was required.24 However, that did not foreclose the idea of considering a censure motion against Trump after the articles of impeachment were rejected. Whether Alexander, Rob Portman, or any other Senate Republicans would have supported censure remains unknown; McConnell would never have let it happen, knowing that Trump would lash out against any criticism. As always, McConnell would choose to win rather than pursue an alternative course that might help educate the country about the singular danger Trump posed to our democracy.
Less than forty-eight hours after being acquitted by the Senate, Trump fired Gordon Sondland and the National Security Council staffer Colonel Alexander Vindman, clearly retaliating against them for testimony they had given during the House impeachment inquiry. Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran, was marched out of the White House by security guards. His brother Yevgeny, an army officer who also served on the NSC staff, was sacked as well.25 At the same time, Trump attacked Joe Manchin for voting to convict him. “I was told by many that Manchin was just a puppet for Schumer & Pelosi,” Trump tweeted. “That’s all he is.”26 He also called on the House to “expunge” his impeachment, “because it was a hoax . . . a total political hoax.”27
Democrats expressed alarm at the purge and the president’s ranting, which confirmed their fear that Trump would be unleashed, rather than chastened, by the outcome of the impeachment trial. But it was understandable why Trump—or any president—would be unwilling to continue working with people who provided testimony in support of his impeachment. Although Sondland had acted out of self-preservation, Vindman and the other high-ranking foreign service officers—Marie Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, and Fiona Hill—had acted out of conscience, told the truth, served their country, and paid a high price. What America needed were acts of conscience and courage from people of stature who did not work for Trump: the Senate Republicans. Their failure to act would have profound consequences in the coming year.