I am strongly leaning towards the House impeaching Trump even though the vote count in the Senate isn't there to convict. I think the House should make certain it lays out a compelling case for impeachment, one that at a small but perhaps signficant GOP members of the Senate will find hard to ignore, especially if they face a tough reelection in 2020. The House hearings will be viewed by millions, even on Fox, especially when high profile players like Mueller testify. They should if possible subpoena members of the Trump family and his White House flunkies.
We should remember that in the Senate trial members of the House act as prosecutors. The president must have his own defense attornies, and I do not think that can be Barr. I don't know if he can use the White House counsel. Even though the GOP controlled Senate sets the actual rules and they would favor the president's side, they can't change who prosecutes the case.
This would give a second bite of the apple to the Democrats as they made their case not just to the jury, that is, the members of the Senate, but to the American people. Odds are Trump won't be removed from office but his base, angry as they would be over the impeachment, would vote for him no matter what. It is his losing a crucial percentage of intelligent conservatives who haven't lost their ethical compass. There's a good article about this in The Atlantic: The Mueller Report Could Alienate the Voters Republicans Need — The special counsel’s findings validate the concerns of anyone who feared how Donald Trump would wield presidential power. (Its conclusion is below)
The Mueller report may not dislodge significant elements of Trump’s electoral coalition, some of whom thrill to his behavior and others who accept it in the same implicit bargain as do Republicans in Congress. But it seems highly likely to reinforce the doubts of the nearly 55 percent of Americans who expressed unease, if not outright revulsion, about him as president through their votes for other candidates in the 2016 election and for Democrats in the 2018 House races.
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In 2016, many of Trump’s voters, uncertain of him but desiring change and dubious of Hillary Clinton, consciously took a flier: According to
exit polls, about one-fifth of his supporters said they doubted that he had the experience to succeed as president, and about one-fourth said they doubted that he had the temperament. (Those numbers were even higher among ambivalent college-educated white voters.) Especially after the brutal bill of particulars that Mueller identified about Trump’s behavior, those voters now face a reckoning on their choice. No member of Congress, no potential executive-branch appointee, and, above all, no voter can claim any illusions about what a Trump second term might look like, especially if enabled by a Congress fully controlled again by Republicans.
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Mueller sent many signals in his report that, given his own legal constraints, he expected Congress to assume responsibility for imposing accountability for Trump’s behavior. But his report also shows the limits of relying solely on courts and prosecutors to uphold the rule of law, or to defend basic standards of morality, in government. After Mueller’s detailed catalog of Trump’s unacceptable, if not indictable, behavior, that responsibility more clearly than ever rests with voters.