A report out of Washington today (from a web site called "The Hill," under the byline of one Alexander Bolton) says that:
Senate Republicans, including those who do not plan to vote to convict former President Trump, say this week's impeachment trial has effectively ended any chance of him becoming the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
Maybe that's true. I hope it is. But what those Senators don't seem to realise is that voting to acquit Trump may well be the end for themselves, as well.
Pretty much anyone who has paid any attention to the political shenanigans of the latter-day Trump regime has seen his tweeted call to come for a wild time in DC on January 6. We all heard his bullshit warnings in October that the election would be stolen from him; we didn't believe it then, most of us (and those who do, frankly, are determined not to be swayed by fact), and we don't believe it now. We heard his November claims, as they escalated in lunacy through more than 60 failed court cases unsupported by a single material shred of evidence, that the election was stolen from him. We who think for ourselves recognize it as the purest sort of self-serving crap. We suspected then, as we know now, that the Republicans in the Senate are mostly toadies living in fear of "getting primaried" by the reactionary fringe. (Who, in all honesty, can still believe that Lindsay Graham has any kind of political backbone? There are less supple jellyfish off the shore at Myrtle Beach.) And we heard what Trump said to the little army he had gathered on the Ellipse on January 6, and we saw what they did to the Capitol on receiving their marching orders.
A vote to acquit, after the case that the House Managers have presented this week, will be certification that the Senator casting that vote would endorse a self-serving lie at any cost to the nation, rather than acknowledge the obvious; and that they would rather try to save their own asses than the representative democracy this nation is so justly proud of.
When they come up for re-election in two, or four, or six years, America will remember this vote unlike any other the Senators may have cast in their careers. Maybe they will get "primaried" by the far-right; maybe they will survive that. They need to take that risk, for the sake of this Nation.
But when most Americans get into the voting booth for the general election in 2022, or 2024, or 2026, the question they will have asked themselves beforehand -- the thing that will be the most determinative of their decision -- will be, How did this Senator vote on Trump's second impeachment? A vote to acquit should prove inexcusable.
The Republican Party is already feeling the turmoil caused by being hijacked by its lunatic fringe. If Trump is not convicted in this open-and-shut impeachment -- and I suspect he won't be -- the GOP will be unable to survive. It will have to splinter into at least two groups: one will be a collection of far-right lunatics who would support the likes Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Josh Hawley (it being better to reign in hell than serve in heaven); the other will be a more mainstream group of conservatives who have had enough of the schlock-show not just of the last four years, but of the last twelve. Neither group will have enough support to govern, and the Democratic Party will have its own way for the foreseeable future.
As a Republican (almost but not quite a former Republican), I think that would be better for America than what we have had lately. I'll take it.
