WASHINGTON — After 11 days sitting silently at the their desks, senators will have their first chance to speak on the Senate floor this week about an impeachment trial that has consumed them since they took oaths as jurors to do impartial justice.
Giving senators an opportunity to explain in floor speeches the votes they have already taken in the trial was one reason for waiting until Wednesday to reconvene as a court of impeachment and render the verdict on President Donald Trump.
Utah Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney plan to give floor speeches, aides said. When that will happen hasn’t been announced.
One person who will be listening in is Jeff Flake, a former Republican senator from Arizona whose outspoken criticism of Trump contributed to his decision not seek re-election in 2018 after one term.
“I hope Republicans will express that what the president did was wrong. Not just inappropriate, but wrong,” he said in an interview Sunday. “What he did might not rise to the level required to overturn an election and remove him from office, but it was wrong.”
He agrees with most of his former colleagues that removing Trump from office would be a mistake with long-lasting consequences.
An increasing number of his former GOP colleagues have been saying the same since Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., expressed those sentiments late Thursday, the night before the Senate voted not to hear more witnesses and bring the trial to a speedy conclusion.
Even Alexander went beyond “inappropriate” his condemnation of Trump’s conduct calling it “improper” and “wrong” on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” And Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who regularly spoke at press briefings for the GOP conference during trial breaks, used the term “wrong manner” on CNN when pressed to characterize the president’s conduct.
The House impeached Trump last month, charging him with abuse of power for allegedly pressuring Ukraine to conduct investigations that would benefit him politically. The second article of impeachment accuses Trump of obstructing Congress during the House investigation into his dealings with Ukraine.
‘Moral hazards’
Alexander said House managers offered up “a mountain of overwhelming evidence” against the president, justifying why he helped clear the way for Trump’s inevitable acquittal by providing a key vote Friday against calling more witnesses.
“If you have eight witnesses who say someone left the scene of an accident, why do you need nine? I mean, the question for me was: Do I need more evidence to conclude that the president did what he did? And I concluded no,” he said.
Flake said he understands that position and that of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who voted against additional evidence because it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of what she thought was a partisan spectacle that would tarnish the Senate if it continued any longer.
But Flake said the other factor to weigh would be “the imperative for the Senate to be seen as not wanting to ignore evidence that was there. That’s why I would have voted for witnesses” with Romney and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
He compared it it to the compromise he brokered in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In that fractious debate, Flake helped a bitterly divided Senate Judiciary Committee to agree to delay their vote until the FBI investigated allegations of sexual assault against the eventual Supreme Court justice.
“I think the public realized that the Senate had not done due diligence,” he said.
The FBI report, Flake said, informed his vote to confirm Kavanaugh.
“It would have been immensely satisfying for me to deny the president his pick for the Supreme Court, but I didn’t think that was the principled thing to do,” Flake said. “You couldn’t establish a standard where the mere allegation, if it wasn’t corroborated at all, that’s 30 years old, could could disqualify somebody from public office. I thought that that’s a precedent you can’t set.”
He said senators face a similar decision Wednesday, And Flake would vote to acquit the president and let voters decide Trump’s fate in November.
“Acquittal might encourage the president that he can even do more,” Flake said. “But there is also great moral hazard on the other side if we get in the habit of using impeachment as a weapon and get in a cycle where we simply try to remove a president in between elections.”
Alexander told The New York Times that convicting Trump would have a more immediate impact.
“The Senate reflects the country, and the country is as divided as it has been for a long time,” he said. “For the Senate to tear up the ballots in this election and say President Trump couldn’t be on it, the country probably wouldn’t accept that. It would just pour gasoline on cultural fires that are burning out there.”
President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. Impeached Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were acquitted by the Senate. And since the House began its impeachment inquiry, it’s become increasingly assured the GOP-controlled Senate will acquit Trump, as well.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned Republicans before the witness vote that as more evidence comes to light confirming allegations of Trump’s abuse of power, they will be remembered more for orchestrating a cover-up than respecting voters who elected Trump.
“America will remember this day, unfortunately, where the Senate did not live up to its responsibilities, where the Senate turned away from truth and went along with a sham trial,” he said.
The verdict
Both Utah’s senators are crafting their floor speeches, but statements given outside the trial and earlier give some hints of what they may say.
Lee, who consulted with the White House on developing Trump’s defense, has never wavered from his position that Trump didn’t ask personal political favors from Ukraine. He described obstruction of Congress as “absurd” and “a made up thing.” He has questioned the motives of the whistleblower, whose complaint launched the impeachment inquiry, and concluded the foreign service workers who testified to House investigators represent a “deep state” of disgruntled career government employees who want to oust a president they disagree with.
But the second-term senator who sits next to Alexander on the front row of the Senate floor is also one of the Senate’s constitutional experts. And he says the extraordinary tool of impeachment will never remove a president unless there is bipartisan support.
“If you’re trying to undo the outcome of a presidential election and disenfranchise voters who elected this president, you darn well better have a good case and you darn well better be able to make your support for it bipartisan,” Lee said last month. “(Democrats) haven’t done that.”
Romney, a freshman senator with a back row desk in the chamber, has never held back when he disagrees with Trump and he was alone in saying he was troubled by the whistleblower’s allegations against the president. He incurred the president’s infamous Twitter wrath when he criticized Trump for also inviting China to join Ukraine in investigating Democratic rival Joe Biden.
But, as the trial approached he was cautious along with other moderates in responding to questions about the charges against Trump, saying he will live up to his oath to do impartial justice.
He spoke out last week, however, in seeking to have former national security adviser John Bolton testify in the Senate trial. Reports about Bolton’s interactions with Trump on Ukraine raised new questions that Romney said he wanted answered to help him render impartial judgment.
“My responsibility in the oath that I took is to apply impartial justice,” Romney told reporters last week. “And when you have questions, when they’re things that have not yet been addressed, that you think are relevant to reaching a final decision, I want to hear the answer to those questions.”
But since calling Bolton as a witness was voted down, Romney, like every other senator, will offer his verdict without additional testimony.