Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that, with the House having impeached Donald Trump, she’s in no great hurry to forward the articles of that impeachment to the Senate. Which makes perfect sense. On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not announced even the broad outlines of how Trump’s impeachment trial will be handled. If Pelosi routes the paperwork his way now, it could either join the 300-plus bills already gathering dust on his desk or be directed straight to a paper shredder.
For all the Republican complaints, Democrats in the House produced a remarkably fair and consistent process for the impeachment of Donald Trump. In previous recent impeachments, a special prosecutor had handled the collection of evidence, interviewing of witnesses, and preparation of the report for the House Judiciary Committee—all of it completely out of sight of Congress. However, since the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the special prosecutor has been eliminated and replaced with the much weaker special investigator law. That law puts the appointment of such prosecutors in the hands of the attorney general and, with the full knowledge that William Barr would have laughed off any attempt to investigate any action of Donald Trump, the House simply had no choice but to come up with a process by which it handled the role that would normally have been taken by the special prosecutor.
The system that was produced was one in which members of both parties had the opportunity to name and question witnesses, and although it was conducted primarily by the Intelligence Committee, more than a hundred members of the House were eligible to attend the first round of (not classified, all information released to the public) closed-door hearings. Republican attempts to paint the investigation as some kind of star chamber were laughable. This hearing was far more open, far more bipartisan, and far more transparent in every way than in any previous impeachment.
But while the House did generate a fair, transparent, bipartisan process in which Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff stepped in only when Republicans attempted to deliberately derail the process, there was no requirement that it do so. Democrats could have produced a process that was deliberately secretive, deliberately partisan, and deliberately designed to generate the desired results. Because the rules of impeachment give the House all the authority to do so.
Unfortunately, that same level of authority now rests with Mitch McConnell. Democratic leaders in the House were constrained by a desire to create a process that would pass muster with the public, one that would be objectively fair. There’s no reason to believe that McConnell feels any such pressure. He’s already made it absolutely clear that he intends to clear Trump, and that he’s working with the White House on a process that will make that acquittal certain. The only constraint that McConnell feels is embarrassment.
McConnell has clearly, repeatedly demonstrated that he has no problem at all completely setting aside fairness, ignoring Senate traditions, and acting in a way that is openly, blatantly partisan. See: Garland, Merrick.
But in the case of the impeachment, it seems that McConnell is pinched between Republican senators who mostly just want the thing to be over and Donald Trump, who appears to want his military parade of missile launchers to roll through the Senate chamber with the whistleblower and Hunter Biden lashed to their hoods. McConnell personally seems to favor a process in which he opens and closes the trial on the same day, allowing just enough time for Republicans to swear fealty, insult Democrats, and sign on not just to tabling the impeachment, but also to finding some way to declare that Trump is more than innocent. McConnell is willing to anoint both Trump and his phone call as “perfect.” It’s not absolutely dead certain that every Republican senator would go along with that, but it’s really pretty damn certain. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins might pretend to have concerns. Lindsey Graham could contradict himself three times before lunch. And then Mitch could raise his gavel just long enough for every Republican to agree that Donald Trump is God’s infallible man on Earth, and also that Democrats are dirty heretics for suggesting otherwise. Hammer down, trial over.
In support of this trial-without-a-trial, McConnell has already dismissed the idea of having witnesses. Just because people appeared to provide testimony in previous Senate trials is no reason McConnell will allow it. Tradition and fairness are words that McConnell believes should be restricted to Christmas cards. In the Senate, he’s been 100% about greasing the pipeline for Republican ownership of the judiciary branch. He has flattened every past rule or process and ignored the idea of the Senate passing legislation to keep that pipeline operating. He’s not about to let something like an impeachment clog up his pipes.
The only real threat to McConnell’s impeachment plunger is Trump’s insistence on a show trial. Trump really wants to use the designed-to-order Senate trial as an opportunity to haul everyone he considers an opponent into the Senate to hoist them over a fire for his pleasure. That’s the point with which Republican senators, including McConnell himself, are having trouble. Not because they are concerned about running a circus that breaks with Senate decorum, but because witnesses have a tendency to provide testimony, and testimony might contain facts.
That’s the only thing McConnell definitely does not want. He and other Republicans have made it absolutely clear that they’re willing to ignore all testimony to date and ride the Republican narrative right to an easy acquittal—even while Trump demands foreign interference on the White House lawn and Rudy Giuliani races from television studio to television studio to explain the details of the extortion scheme. But if Trump forces something that looks more like a trial, he might get … something that’s more like a trial.
That’s the one thing Giuliani can’t abide. Expect him to do what most people in the White House generally do: promise Trump to do what he asks, then ignore him. But in the meantime, those articles of impeachment are likely to remain in Pelosi’s safe.