Okay, the Senate vote has been taken. Nobody ever expected it to reach 67, anyway. Now, it’s time to deal with the electorate. Others have better access to the electorate than we do, but each of us has a voice that can be heard. Collectively, we have some influence. I emphasize Letters to the Editor because they are the most effective, but many news sources provide blogs for their readers or listeners. There is always one’s own FB or other social media.
It’s probably not the time for armchair strategists to second-guess the House managers, but all sorts of other points can be made. I have some below, but your own ideas are better.
One can either point to the 7 Republican senators or the 43.
On the one hand:
Three presidents have had trials of impeachment in the Senate. (Nixon never did.) Only Trump has had senators of his own party vote against him.
58% of Americans polled thought that Trump should have been convicted. 57% of senators agreed with them.
On the on the other hand:
When Trump sent an armed band into the Capitol to overturn the results of an election, he put the lives of everyone in the Capitol in danger. Forty-three Republican senators voted that their danger had been justified by that goal.
Several previous impeachments – including the very first, while many authors of the Constitution were still alive – occurred after the defendant had left office; the Republicans said that the Senate wasn’t bound by precedent because it wrote its own rules. The Senate voted that the power of impeachment applied to people who had left office; 43 Republican senators decided that it didn’t because the defendant was a Republican.
In 2019, the (then Republican-controlled) Senate decided to not hear any witnesses. In 2020, Senate Republicans declared that Trump’s guilt hadn’t been established because what everybody knew – even wat they had seen themselves -- had not been established by the testimony of witnesses.
Most Republican senators decided that Trump’s response to losing an election wasn’t far enough from standard Republican practice to be punished. When Republicans lose an election by the rules, they change the rules to win the next election. When Trump lost an election by the rules. he sent an armed mob to change the rules so that he had won this one.
There are other points.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict because the evidence proved that Trump was guilty. In every case, their state party scolded them that following the evidence is not the Republican way. (I’m not sure that it was EVERY case. Check it out. If you are in the state of one of the seven, check out your state, and use only that.)
The defense argued that Trumps speech was no more inflammatory than Senator Warren’s saying “fight.” Does that mean that Republican audiences are much more prone to violence than Democratic audiences?
I’m not Jewish and have no standing to write to a Jewish publication. I do guess, however, that some Jews would feel uncomfortable with guy who had a supporter wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt fighting for him.