Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is starting to admit that there will likely be an impeachment trial in the Senate. After weeks of trying to shut the possibility down, McConnell used a closed-door Republican lunch for “a PowerPoint presentation about the impeachment process and fielded questions alongside his staff and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who was a manager for the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton,” The Washington Post reports.
McConnell is planning for the Senate to meet six days a week to try to bust through the trial, and Sen. Kevin Cramer said, “There’s sort of a planned expectation that it would be sometime around Thanksgiving, so you’d have basically Thanksgiving to Christmas—which would be wonderful because there’s no deadline in the world like the next break to motivate senators.”
United States Chief Justice John Roberts would preside over the trial, and while Roberts is a committed partisan, he’s perhaps slightly more sensitive to the judgment of history than is McConnell when it comes to things like brazenly cutting an impeachment trial short. Perhaps.
In the meantime, as the House continues its inquiry, Republicans intend to keep on screaming that Trump isn’t getting a fair process. Graham has gone so far as to urge his fellow senators to write House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter calling Trump’s pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig for dirt on Trump’s political opponents “unimpeachable.” Because if a few Republican senators say something is unimpeachable, it magically becomes so, regardless of the facts of the case? Graham must really be feeling like he has to grovel to Trump a little extra to atone for having been critical of Trump’s Syria policy.