Told you that one wasn’t going to work

| 4:20 pm EST January 19, 2020
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Last week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signed onto an effort to dismiss the impeachment charges against Donald Trump, instead of having a trial. This struck fear in a lot of observers, largely because the media portrayed this as something that might actually succeed. Now even Trump’s own team is publicly admitting today that the effort to dismiss the charges is dead on arrival. If you’ve been reading Palmer Report, this doesn’t come as a surprise to you, because McConnell never had the votes to pull this off. In fact we should take a moment to dissect what McConnell was really doing here, because it’ll help us to better understand his antics and strategy going forward.

This all started when certain Republican Senators started publicly talking about wanting a legitimate impeachment trial, because they were worried that voters might take it out on them if they’re seen as giving Trump a sham trial. This made Trump fear that an impeachment trial could damage him (whether he was ultimately removed or not), so he announced on Twitter that he wanted the Republican Senate to simply dismiss the charges with no trial.

Mitch McConnell then jumped on board with this idea, because it goaded the media into spending a few days talking about the (imaginary) possibility of a dismissal, instead of talking about the (real) possibility of Republican Senators forcing McConnell to call witnesses. McConnell frequently announces his political fantasies as if he were going to be able to make them happen. He always pretends he has the votes, especially when he doesn’t have the votes. He knew he didn’t have the votes for a dismissal. It was a head fake.

It’s the latest reminder that you can safely dismiss nearly all of what Mitch McConnell is saying – even when the media is treating his words as if they were fact. Instead it’s better to pay attention to the hints that McConnell’s Republican Senators are publicly dropping about what they’re going to push McConnell into doing. He doesn’t have a magic wand, and he frequently doesn’t have the votes to do the things he’s vowing to do. At a time when Republican Senators were publicly talking about calling witnesses against Donald Trump at the trial, there obviously weren’t the votes to magically dismiss the charges without a trial. Let’s keep that in mind for next time McConnell threatens to do something that’s impossible.