Peachy Impeachment News!
There will be no witnesses at the U.S. Senate’s impeachment trial, because the Republican majority voted almost unanimously against the proposition. Mitt Romney, who is widely accomplished, famous, rich, Mormon, and unlikely to care much about running for re-election in 2025, when he will be seventy-seven years old, defied his party’s sycophancy and craven political calculation and voted for witnesses. He will be vilified for this among Trumpublicans, who will call him a coward and a sell-out and an establishment hack — for showing the backbone to defy his own party leadership, stand up to the wrath of his voters, and reject the universal demand that he bow to the establishment’s will.
Now, undoubtedly, the GOP majority will push forward with a vote to acquit Mitch McConnell’s puppet without admitting any new facts or testimony — including testimony blocked by the White House during the House impeachment hearings, so the GOP cannot honestly claim “we’ve already heard all the relevant evidence” — into the case. This sheepish deference will boost even further (if possible) Trump’s feelings of moral impunity and political unstoppability. All because Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse — the senate’s “principled conservatives” and “Tea Partiers” and “constitutionalists” — lack the courage, principle, and moral rectitude of Milquetoast Mitt.
A day after criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the Iran confrontation a few weeks ago, Lee, obviously feeling the heat from the cultists, including the ones whose votes he craves for his power-mongering future (his re-election will occur during Trump’s second term in office) “clarified” his criticism this way:
I applaud this president. I support this president. This president has been fantastic. He’s been unprecedentedly deferential to the American people, and restrained in his use of the commander in chief power, more than any other president in my lifetime.
What a shameful time in America. And so helpfully revealing.