It generally doesn’t bother me to have original thoughts. (Au contraire.) But in this instance, the fact that I’ve not come across anyone saying anything similar to what I argue here does give me pause. (Especially given that the subject is at the center of attention for a great many intelligent people.) By give me pause, I mean that more than usual I recognize that I might be mistaken as I argue, below: The Democrats should make their case powerfully for a “fair trial,” but in might better serve their interests to lose than to win that battle.
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I’ll begin with this proposition: the most urgent tasks for today’s Democratic Party are to protect the nation by wresting power both from this lawless President, and from this morally bankrupt Trump Party.
The impeachment process should be understood as being about both those tasks.
If there were a real chance that the Senate would vote to remove Trump from office, such removal would be their rightful goal in the Senate trial. But the likelihood of that is so vanishingly small that everyone seems to be focused not on the drama of convict vs. acquit, but on whether this will be a “real trial,” with the most relevant witnesses and documents providing the evidence, or a “sham trial.” In other words, on whether Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate will abet Trump’s efforts to keep the truth from the American people.
So the news reports that the Democrats are “nervous” about the upcoming battle over whether witnesses and documents will be subpoenaed by the Senate to be part of the trial. The signs evidently are not favorable that at least four Republicans will break ranks with Trump to join the Democrats in calling for additional evidence.
The Democrats want a “fair trial,” and the Republicans clearly don’t.
But what if the two parties are mistaking their true interests here?
Now it may well be true that the Democrats likely benefit from prolonging the trial, and the Republicans from cutting it short. Presumably that’s because the more the public is marinated in the story of Trump’s misconduct, the worse for Trump and the Trump Party.
So to that extent, each side likely correctly identifies its interests in the “new witnesses” fight.
But other than extending the time that the trial is in the headlines, how much would this new testimony and other evidence actually help the Democrats?
The Democrats have already done an excellent job in bringing “witnesses” into the Senate trial, with the abundant use of video clips from the outstanding testimony that a variety of relevant witnesses gave during the impeachment hearings in the House. So people following the trial have already heard from witnesses. The evidence of Trump’s guilt that the Democrats have already presented is — as is widely recognized — quite overwhelming. Even if John Bolton and Mark Mulvaney could add more testimony to that entirely sufficient pile of evidence, and had more direct contact with the President who is being tried, can anything they could say really add anything decisive about a picture that is already plenty clear enough? Would the picture that the American public has absorbed really change? Besides how unlikely it is that anything the new witnesses or documents would show would be anything even approaching a game-changer, there’s a real possibility that the likes of Bolton and Mulvaney would muddy the waters. (Bolton might not like the drug deal, but neither is he a friend to the Democrats; and Mulvaney is Trump’s guy.) Their testimony would be under oath, but we’ve already seen how little regard a lot of Republicans have for sworn oaths, and the current Attorney General is not about to prosecute them for perjury that helps the Trumpites.So the benefits of winning the fight to get witnesses and documents would seem to be quite limited. And those small benefits need to be weighed against the likely benefits of losing that battle.
A very big majority of American citizens — including, according to one recent poll, 69% of Republicans — want for this trial to include the testimony of new witnesses (that were blocked from testifying in the House impeachment hearings). So if the Republicans defeat measures to bring in such testimony, the potential for the Republicans to pay a political cost is there. As for Trump, as the Democrats have been saying, if Trump gets acquitted after a trial that the majority of the people regard as bogus (or at least manifestly incomplete), that will not be seen as an “exoneration” in any meaningful sense. (Whereas, if the Democrats win the fight over new witnesses and then, as everyone expects, the Republican majority votes to acquit him, even though that “acquittal” will actually be a scandal, much of the public might be persuaded to think it means that Trump was exonerated.) In particular, in the fight itself, and in the aftermath of the Republicans succeeding in their role as accomplices to Trump’s cover-up of his crimes, the Democrats will have a huge opportunity to display to the American people just how despicable the Republicans have become. (See my piece of January 21, “Emphasize the Contradiction:‘He Did Nothing Wrong’ and ‘Let’s Keep What He Did Hidden.” The Republicans have tied themselves ever deeper to Trump. The trial of this most impeachable of Presidents represents the ultimate test of the extent of their moral bankruptcy. If four Republicans join Democrats to include what every trial always includes — i.e. to make this like a real trial — that will provide the GOP with a degree of ambiguity about their profound corruption. But if the Republicans win that fight, they hand the Democrats a powerful weapon to wield against them in the upcoming election. In other words, this is as good an opportunity as one can imagine to make the Republicans pay the appropriate political price for their choice to put serving Trump ahead of their oath of office and the good of the nation.So it seems quite possible that the Democrats will be better served for both their goals — taking power from both Trump (not exonerated) and the Trump Party (accomplices in the cover-up and obstruction) in the 2020 elections — if they lose this “new witnesses” fight.
It is important to fight that fight hard, as if it mattered greatly— because the more dramatically impactful the fight, the better it will demonstrate the disgraceful cover-up that Trump’s craven servants have perpetrated in the Republican-dominated Senate.
But even as they fight hard, I don’t think they should be “nervous” about the chance their lose that battle.
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Postscript: I’ve written and posted a follow-up piece which makes the related but more important argument, that it will be “Time Soon To Turn the Spotlight from Trump’s Evil to His Republican Accomplices.” This impeachment process is a major showdown in an ongoing war that the Republicans have been waging for a generation, but the Democrats have only started to fight when the picked up the weapon of impeachment. But winning that war is about a lot more than Donald Trump. And the coming battles
over the “fair trial” vs. “cover-up” and about “remove a dangerous President” vs. “keep the powers of the presidency in someone who has demonstrated abundantly how dangerous and untrustworthy he is in wielding those powers.”Will expose the Republicans in ways that the Democrats should now bring into the starkest relief.