The Democrats blew it on witnesses
They had Trump’s lawyers on the run. Then they let them get away.
Margaret Carlson, a veteran of CNN and Time magazine, is a weekly columnist at The Daily Beast.
Democrats snatched defeat Saturday from the jaws of a victory—a moral victory only perhaps, but an important one nonetheless—when they changed their minds at the last minute and decided not to call witnesses.
Donald Trump's hapless defense lawyers, taking direction from the golf cart of their furious client, blundered worse than Cousin Vinny or Rudy Giuliani when they feigned ignorance about what Trump was doing Jan. 6 while a mob was committing violence and vandalism at the Capitol. That’s something you’re supposed to have found out by taking testimony, Trump’s lawyers said to the House managers. So Senate Democrats and a few Republican allies voted to do just that.
Then they reversed themselves, reportedly fearing that the impeachment proceedings could drag on for weeks, and settled for entering into the record a statement from Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R.-Wash.)—confirmed by CNN with multiple Republican sources—that Trump had answered a plea by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to quell the rioters by saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D.-Md.) read Herrera Beutler’s statement into the record. But although Raskin gave a number of powerful speeches throughout the impeachment trial, his recitation of Herrera Beutler’s testimony wasn’t especially effective. Certainly it had nothing like the impact it would have coming from Herrera Beutler herself. That would have vindicated the Democrats’ impeachment case in living, breathing color.
In complaining about the trial’s lack of due process, Michael Van der Veen, Donald Trump's Rent-a-Lawyer (his firm’s website claims it’s “Philadelphia’s foremost personal injury and dog bite law firm”) made a classic lawyer’s mistake. He opened the door to a room that, from his client’s perspective, should have stayed locked. Let's have sworn witnesses, hundreds of them! Depositions galore! In my office in Philadelphia!
This last drew a laugh, but the last laugh was on Democrats, and shame on them. They took at face value Joe Biden's public comments that he was concerned solely with his policy agenda, and that Republicans would grind his agenda to a halt so long as the trial was in session. That was never going to happen. Republicans wouldn't dare hold up Covid relief altogether and risk losing votes in the next election after Trump already lost them Congress and the White House. In falling for this bluff, Democrats repeated precisely the error they’d made at Trump's first impeachment. Not calling witnesses was cited widely as a crucial element in Trump’s first acquittal. (The Democrats tried, but they didn’t have the votes.) It will also come to be recognized as a crucial element in the second.
When presiding officer Sen. Patrick Leahy said no new evidence would be permitted, and that any such evidence offered would be stricken, you could almost hear a sigh of relief from the Republicans side. They would not have to witness a Republican House member relate a devastating story about Trump’s vindictiveness to an ally—the usually-groveling McCarthy. For a moment, McCarthy had failed to lend what Trump considered sufficient support to his delusional post-election pursuit of a second term. They would have had to confront McCarthy effectively admitting (albeit secondhand) that Trump enjoyed the Capitol Hill riot.
Would witness testimony have changed the outcome? Perhaps not. Maybe the Democrats would have just traded a quick acquittal for a longer one. But they would have gained an opportunity to make Republicans suffer much more for their capitulation to Trump. (Here's praying Sen. Bill Cassidy (R.-La.), the surprise vote to convict, won’t retire.)
No Republican was more craven than Mitch McConnell, who waited until after the vote was taken to blame Trump—as he did initially before going enigmatic—for the mob that threatened his life and others on Jan. 6. "There's no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said. “No question about it." McConnell argued that although the accusation against Trump had merit, an impeachment trial held after a president’s term has ended was unconstitutional. Never mind that that view is contradicted by Senate history, by constitutional scholarship, and by the Senate’s own vote on the question this week. And of course it was a classic McConnell maneuver to have previously prevented the trial from taking place while Trump was still president.
McConnell will, I think, come to regret this vote. Even if he doesn’t, historians will more readily remember how he voted than his sorry excuses for doing so. But Democrats will have reason to regret the outcome, too. They blew an opportunity to make Trump’s second impeachment even more difficult for Republicans to forget.