Donald Trump’s impeachment is already blowing up in Senate Republicans’ faces

| 7:00 pm EST December 17, 2019
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has now publicly voiced at least five different and conflicting iterations of how he plans to handle Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial. This tells us that he knows there’s no good way for him to handle it, and that he’s throwing things at the wall in the hope of finding whatever might do the least damage to his party’s chances of retaining the Senate in 2020. It looks like Mitch is headed back to the drawing board.

This morning Chuck Schumer publicly urged Mitch McConnell to call reluctant witnesses like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney to testify in the Senate impeachment trial. McConnell quickly and loudly rejected the idea. But new polling from ABC News and the Washington Post says that 71% of all Americans, and 64% of all Republicans, want these kinds of witnesses to testify at the trial.

McConnell can go forward without calling these witnesses if he wants; it’s his show. But we all know that his primary goal is to survive this trial without losing his Senate majority – and with these kinds of public opinion numbers stacked against him, he and the Senate GOP will pay the price in 2020 if they refuse to call relevant witnesses.

This means Mitch McConnell has to go back to the drawing board and try to come up with an impeachment trial strategy that doesn’t put his Senate majority at risk. He could just do the right thing entirely, but that’s not his style. Instead he’ll try to come up with some corrupt new way to provide minimal help to Donald Trump without having to stick his own neck out too far. What’s clear is that if such a balance does exist, Mitch hasn’t found it yet. This trial could get dropped in his lap at any time, and he still hasn’t figured out how he wants to play it.