Donald Trump set for impeachment acquittal after Senate votes to reject additional witnesses

Donald Trump is heading for a speedy acquittal next week after the Senate voted against bringing additional impeachment witnesses.

The US Senate has narrowly rejected Democratic demands to summon additional witnesses for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, all but ensuring Trump’s acquittal in just the third trial to threaten a president’s removal in US history.

But senators pushed off final voting on his fate to next Wednesday.

The delay in timing showed the weight of a historic vote bearing down on senators, despite prodding by the president eager to have it all behind him in an election year and ahead of his State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke by phone to lock in the schedule during a tense night at the Capitol as rushed negotiations proceeded on and off the Senate floor.

The president wanted to arrive for his speech at the Capitol with acquittal secured, but that will not happen.

Instead, the trial will resume Monday for final arguments, with time Monday and Tuesday for senators to speak. The final voting is planned for 4pm Wednesday, the day after Trump’s speech.

Trump’s acquittal is all but certain in the Senate, where his GOP allies hold the majority and there’s nowhere near the two-thirds needed for conviction and removal.

Nor will he face potentially damaging, open-Senate testimony from witnesses.

Despite the Democrats’ singular focus on hearing new testimony, the Republican majority brushed past those demands and will make this the first impeachment trial without witnesses.

Even new revelations Friday from former national security adviser John Bolton did not sway GOP senators, who said they’d heard enough.

That means the eventual outcome for Trump will be an acquittal “in name only,” said Florida Democratic Representative Val Demings, a House prosecutor, during final debate.

Mr Trump was impeached by the House last month on charges that he abused power and obstructed Congress as he tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, using military aid as leverage as the ally fought Russia.

He is charged with then blocking the congressional probe of his actions.

Senators rejected the Democrats’ effort to allow new witnesses, 51-49, a near party-line vote. Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah voted with the Democrats, but that was not enough.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called that decision “a tragedy on a very large scale.” But Republicans said Mr Trump’s acquittal was justified and inevitable.

The Democrats had badly wanted testimony from Mr Bolton, whose forthcoming book links Mr Trump directly to the charges. But Mr Bolton won’t be summoned, and none of this appeared to affect the trial’s expected outcome.

Democrats forced a series of new procedural votes late Friday to call Mr Bolton and White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others, but all were rejected.

In an unpublished manuscript, Mr Bolton has written that the president asked him during an Oval Office meeting in early May to bolster his effort to get Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to a person who read the passage and told The Associated Press.

The person, who was not authorised to disclose contents of the book, spoke only on condition of anonymity.

In the meeting, Mr Bolton said the president asked him to call new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and persuade him to meet with Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was planning to go to Ukraine to coax the Ukrainians to investigate the president’s political rivals.

Mr Bolton writes that he never made the call to Mr Zelenskiy after the meeting, which included acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

The White House has blocked its officials from testifying in the proceedings and objected that there are “significant amounts of classified information” in Mr Bolton’s manuscript. Mr Bolton resigned last September — Mr Trump says he was fired — and he and his lawyer have insisted the book does not contain any classified information.

There is no question, Senator Lamar Alexander said, that President Donald Trump actions were “inappropriate” when he asked Ukraine’s leader to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden. But not bad enough, he said, to warrant Mr Trump’s removal from office, or even to hear from witnesses or other evidence.

That distinction has been embraced by other Republicans as the trial moves toward a near-certain acquittal of the president in the coming days.

It’s also in line with arguments from Mr Trump’s legal team, which after initially asserting that the president did “absolutely nothing wrong” moved toward insisting that Trump had done nothing impeachable — and attacked the trial as a partisan exercise.

The evolving arguments have allowed Republicans to cite political and historical grounds for acquitting Mr Trump without feeling compelled to condone his behaviour, a split-the-difference judgment that avoids a clean break with the president as he stands for re-election.

Mr Alexander, who is retiring from office at the end of the year, was the most vocal, saying he did not need to hear more evidence to conclude that Mr Trump was wrong to ask a foreign leader to investigate a rival.

“But,” said Mr Alexander, “the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”

Similarly, Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican whose opinions have been closely watched because of her centrist reputation, issued a five-paragraph statement Friday that declared her opposition to witnesses without mentioning Mr Trump once or registering any support for his actions.

“Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout, I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate,” Ms Murkowski said. “I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything.”

SOURCE 

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The Cult of Western Shaming

Victor Davis Hanson

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.  Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.

My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon emissions.

Whether the world continues to spew carbons will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.

In the late 1950s, many elites in United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.

By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.

Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.

After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

The U.S. and Europe are often quite critical of violence against women, minorities and gays. The European Union, for example, has often singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.

Yet if the purpose of Western human rights activism is to curb global bias and hate, then it would be far more cost-effective to concentrate on the greatest offenders.

China is currently detaining about a million Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps. Yet activist groups aren’t calling for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Beijing in the same way they target Israel.

Homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran. Scores of Iranian gays reportedly have been incarcerated and thousands executed under theocratic law since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Yet rarely do Western activist groups call for global ostracism of Iran.

Don’t look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for any meaningful condemnation of worldwide prejudice and hatred, although it is a frequent critic of both the U.S. and Israel.

Many of the 47 member nations of the Human Rights Council are habitual violators of human rights. In 2017, nine member nations persecuted citizens who were actively working to implement U.N. standards of human rights.

There are many reasons for Westerners’ selective outrage and pessimism toward their own culture. Cowardice explains some of the asymmetry. Blasting tiny democratic Israel will not result in any retaliation. Taking on a powerful China or a murderous Iran could earn retribution.

Guilt also explains some of the selectivity. European nations are still blamed for 19th century colonialism and imperialism. They will always seek absolution, as the citizens of former colonial and Third World nations act like perpetual victims — even well into the postmodern 21st century.

Virtue-signaling is increasingly common. Western elites often harangue about misdemeanors when they cannot address felonies — a strange sort of psychological penance that excuses their impotence.

It is much easier for the city of Berkeley to ban clean-burning, U.S.-produced natural gas in newly constructed buildings than it is to outlaw far dirtier crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Currently, the sexist, homophobic, autocratic Saudis are the largest source of imported oil in California, sending the state some 100 million barrels per year, without which thousands of Berkeley motorists could not get to work. Apparently, outlawing clean, domestic natural gas allows one to justify importing unclean Saudi oil.

Western elites are perpetually aggrieved. But the next time they direct their lectures at a particular target, consider the source and motivation of their outrage.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

ADDRESSING EXPLOITATION: Trump to sign executive order combating human trafficking (The Hill)

IDEOLOGY TRUMPS MORALITY: Warren vows to give "young trans person" veto power over her secretary of education pick (National Review)

MEMO TO DON LEMON: Trump supporters score higher on verbal ability tests (The Volokh Conspiracy)

ATTACK FALLOUT: Fourteen more U.S. troops diagnosed with brain injury following Iranian missile attack, bring the total to 64 (NBC News)

POLICY: Do subprime auto loans threaten the U.S. economy? (RealClearPolicy)

POLICY: Poverty stats greatly overstate how many Americans are destitute (Intellectual Takeout)

WHO'S READY FOR MORE DEBT? House Democrats release $760 billion "green" infrastructure plan (National Review)

SELF-AWARENESS FAIL: Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren proposes criminal penalties for spreading voting disinformation online (CNBC)

"I DID NOT LIE TO THEM": Michael Flynn takes on "egregious" FBI misconduct, little-known FBI agent in guilty-plea withdrawal (Fox News)

BEYOND IDIOTIC: Convicted of sex crimes as a man, felon no longer deemed threat because of gender change (Storm Lake Times)

SLOW BUT STEADY: Fourth-quarter GDP rose only 2.1% and full-year 2019 posts slowest growth in three years at 2.3% (CNBC)

APEX REACHED? Drug deaths fall for first time in nearly 20 years, buoying U.S. life expectancy (Washington Examiner)

THOUSAND TALENTS PLAN: Acclaimed Harvard scientist is arrested, accused of lying about ties to China (NPR)

OPEN BORDERS: MS-13 gang member deported five times found in U.S. again (The Daily Wire)

WHEN THEY CAN'T GO OVER THEY GO UNDER: Feds expose longest illicit cross-border tunnel ever discovered on southwest border (The Daily Wire)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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