Mitch McConnell is at it again

| 10:30 am EST January 20, 2020
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Earlier this month Mitch McConnell signed onto a Senate Republican effort to simply dismiss the impeachment charges against Donald Trump, instead of having a trial. At the time, Palmer Report pointed out that McConnell clearly didn’t have the votes to pull this off, and he was merely blowing smoke. Yesterday, Donald Trump’s allies went on television and admitted that there aren’t enough votes to dismiss. But now McConnell is quickly at it again.

Now that everyone involved has had to publicly admit that there never was going to be any magic dismissal of the impeachment charges ahead of the trial, Mitch McConnell is now floating a new fantasy to Fox News. He’s attaching his name to a new Senate Republican motion to introduce a “kill switch” into the impeachment trial rules, which would allow them to move for a dismissal at any point during the trial, if things get too ugly for Trump. This is even more laughable than Mitch’s previous leaked fantasy.

Republican Senators are already nervous enough about being seen as complicit in gifting Donald Trump a sham impeachment trial – and thus getting punished by voters when they’re up for reelection – to the point that Mitch McConnell doesn’t currently have enough votes to dismiss the charges. If the trial starts getting ugly for Trump, those same Republican Senators will become even more nervous about being seen as complicit. If McConnell doesn’t have the votes to dismiss now, he sure as hell won’t have the votes to dismiss in the middle of an ugly trial. Acquit at the end of the trial? Probably. Dismiss during the trial? Absolutely not.

But this is simply how Mitch McConnell operates. He takes a fantasy like this and he announces it as if it were going to happen. Then the mainstream media begins tripping over itself to report this fantasy as if it were real, to the point of not reporting any of the real narratives, such as the growing number of Republican Senators who are getting nervous about the trial out loud. As we explained yesterday, you almost never need to listen to what McConnell is saying. He’s only ever trying to distract everyone from what’s really going on.