As expected, President Trump was acquitted of high crimes and misdemeanors, winning – in a vote emblematic of his time in government – 43-57.
Yes, 57 Senators, a simple majority, voted to convict, but because a super-majority is required by the Constitution, the sordid political loyalties of 43 Republican Senators were sufficient to spare the former President the indignity of a post-Presidency conviction and probable banning from future public office.
I am appalled.
Who were the seven Republicans who remembered their duty?
Ben Sasse (Nebraska)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Richard Burr (North Carolina)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania)
Mitt Romney (Utah)
Bill Cassidy (Louisiana)
Burr and Toomey have already announced their retirements in 2022. Collins and Murkowski are the most moderate of the Republican Senators. Romney still believes the Republican Party can be a responsible governing body – and dislikes Trump for both moral and personal reasons. Sasse has a history of no follow-through when it comes to Trump, so this is a break in his pattern.
And Cassidy? He’s not been on my radar. But Louisiana is not the Republican long-time stronghold that it may appear to be. Cassidy, in fact, had to defeat a Democratic incumbent to become a Senator in 2014. In Louisiana, Senate elections consist of a jungle primary in which the top two advance to the general, unless someone wins more than 50% of the primary. In 2020, Cassidy did so. Given the number of Democratic candidates, though, he may be worried about Democratic voters in the future, looked at Trump’s non-existent future, and decided he’d rather be on the side of sanity, despite a TrumpScore of 89.1%.
And that may work for him. Or perhaps he was simply being earnest.
But the point is that all the Senators who owed some large part of their success, inasmuch assuming office and achieving their trivial goals counts as success, to former President Trump couldn’t help but bow down to the man who deliberately and maliciously put them in danger in a desperate attempt to stop a standard part of our democracy. It’s simply a travesty.
So what’s next for a disgraced Republican Party? Will we see more defections as more members of the base come to the realization that an insurrection was held in their name, their Senators failed to repudiate it, and now this moral depravity is on them if they do nothing about it?
Time will tell.
