Donald Trump’s sham acquittal is already blowing up in Senate Republicans’ faces
Even though Donald Trump’s sham trial is all but over with the result that many of us were dreading, you might think that Senate Republicans would want to go back to work, even if it means doing despicable things without distraction. After all, Mitch McConnell claimed that impeachment was the reason Republicans weren’t getting anything done – that what was happening in the House was somehow the reason he decided to block 400 bills from even coming up for a vote in the Senate.
Before impeachment was even in the cards – before we got news of the Ukraine scandal, Republicans liked to spread around the argument that somehow impeaching Trump would make him more popular. They were somehow making a parallel to President Clinton’s impeachment where Clinton actually did end up being more popular when the trial was over, but that’s about the only parallel they paid attention to regarding Clinton’s impeachment.
Now Senate Republicans have suddenly changed their tune, with Lindsey Graham going on Fox Business on Sunday to say that “in the coming weeks,” the Senate Intelligence Committee “will call the whistleblower.”
There’s a few things going on here. Graham clearly doesn’t have the ability to do this, or he would’ve already done it, rather than vote against having witnesses. He knows that simply blocking witnesses blew up in his face and that Donald Trump wasn’t too happy about it either as he wanted a full trial that would confirm his inane conspiracy theories. This will either overwhelmingly be voted down or only make Trump’s corruption more glaringly obvious, especially after so many Republicans wrote the whole thing off as nothing more to see. It won’t compel anyone to vote for Trump who wasn’t voting for him already, and maybe that’s part of the problem – Graham clearly cares about his own dimming re-election odds and no one else.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making