Senate Acquits Trump of 2 Impeachment Articles, Concluding Historic and Wrenching Trial

The Republican-controlled Senate, as has been expected since last week, voted Wednesday to acquit President Donald Trump on the two impeachment articles against him -- that he abused his high office and obstructed Congress' efforts to investigate the matter.

On the first article, abuse of power, the vote was 52-48. On the second, obstruction, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who'd broken ranks with the GOP on the first vote, rejoined the party and voted to acquit. That made the final vote 53-47 in favor of acquittal.

In voting as it did shortly after 4 p.m. ET, GOP lawmakers railed against what they say was a rushed process by the House of Representatives, while Democrats decried Trump as a threat to democracy.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also saw a threat to democracy -- the impeachment drive itself: "We simply cannot let factional fever break our institutions," he intoned just prior to the vote. "The institutions must break the fever, rather than the other way around."

He expressed concern that the partisan tussling and attack on government institutions would continue well beyond the impeachment vote.

Like the vote, the historic, three-week trial proceeded along partisan lines, with just a few undecided members even considering breaking with their party.

But Romney, Utah Republican senator, said Wednesday afternoon that he'd break with his party and vote for conviction on abuse of power, the only member of the GOP expected to actually do so. That was historic, positioning him as only the first senator in U.S. history to vote to impeach a president of his own party.

Romney voted that Trump was not guilty of the second article, obstruction.

As the vote unfolded, he remained alone in that regard, though some Republican senators did express reservations about Trump’s conduct; some even went so far as to say that House Democrats successfully made their case against him.

Nonetheless, Trump’s acquittal was never truly in doubt in the Senate. Even Republicans who disapproved of Trump's dealings with Ukraine — the heart of the House impeachment charges — said his conduct did not merit making him the first president ever removed from office.

In ways unimaginable when he was first elected as a political newcomer, Trump has come to utterly dominate the GOP. Republican lawmakers bow to his overwhelming popularity with the party’s base. "It’s not a party of ideas or ideology anymore. It’s a cult of personality,'' tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

Republicans insisted they were acting in the interests of their constituents and their conscience, and they reacted with outrage when Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead impeachment manager, cited a media report claiming that a person close to Trump had warned Republicans their “head will be on a pike” if they voted against the president.

Trump has already shown his power to cast out dissident Republicans. Besides Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who voted for the impeachment articles and is now an independent, former Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona decided not to run for reelection rather than face voters after clashing with Trump.

It remains to be seen how the vote to convict by Romney will be treated in the future. But Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, tweeted Friday evening that Romney's decision to vote in favor of having witnesses in Trump's trial — a measure that ultimately was denied, 51-49 — squashed any chance of him attending the Feb. 26-29 CPAC conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Trump ally

In the Senate proceedings, McConnell. R-Ky., again proved himself Trump's most important ally. He led a drive to deny Democrats any opportunity to call witnesses before the Senate and worked closely with the White House in shepherding the case to acquittal, fulfilling a pledge he made before the trial to "take my cues from the president’s lawyers.”

McConnell slammed House Democrats' drive to impeach Trump as “the most rushed, least fair and least thorough" in history. He said the two impeachment charges against Trump — that he abused his power and obstructed Congress' ensuing investigation — are "constitutionally incoherent” and don't "even approach a case for the first presidential removal in American history.''

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York accused McConnell and his GOP colleagues of sweeping Trump's misconduct under the rug. “The administration, its top people and Senate Republicans are all hiding the truth," Schumer said, adding that Trump tried to “blackmail a foreign country to interfere in our elections."

Republicans, though in lockstep on acquittal, did in some cases say they wanted to be on record as frowning on his conduct. Perhaps the most prominent example was retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who voted against hearing from witnesses but called out Trump's actions “inappropriate."

Other Republicans followed suit, insisting that their votes against witnesses or in favor of acquittal should not be interpreted as approval of his actions.

"I do not believe that the House has met its burden of showing that the president’s conduct — however flawed — warrants the extreme step of immediate removal from office,'' said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

“Our country is already too deeply divided and we should be working to heal wounds, not create new ones. It is better to let the people decide," added Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

No president has ever been removed by the Senate. President Andrew Johnson was found not guilty in the Senate — by one vote — in 1868. The Senate voted in 1999 to acquit President Bill Clinton of lying under oath about a sexual affair with a White House intern. And President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before he could be impeached in the House over the infamous Watergate scandal.

Fallout

The end of the Senate impeachment trial won't bring an end to revelations about Trump's dealings with Ukraine. There are books to be written and documents being withheld by the administration that could ultimately become public.

Former national security adviser John Bolton writes in a book due out next month that Trump tied the suspension of military aid to Ukraine to investigations that Trump wanted, just as House prosecutors alleged. The Justice Department disclosed in a court filing last weekend that it has 24 emails related to Ukraine that it has not produced.

Additional disclosures are possible from witnesses who testified in the House impeachment inquiry and may feel emboldened to share even more now that the president has been acquitted. Or witnesses unknown to the public could step forward.

Democrats are fighting to release grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and for the testimony of ex-White House lawyer Don McGahn.

As only the third impeachment of a president in American history, Trump's impeachment had little precedent from which to draw. Also, each Congress has significant latitude to set its own rules.

But there were defining elements of this impeachment that may blaze the path for future cases.

For one thing, a party seeking to have a trial over and done with in a matter of weeks will be able to point to the Trump case as precedent. The verdict was returned just 15 days after the trial began in earnest, without the Senate hearing from a single witness.

Future Congresses also may take their cues from the Democrats. They could follow the lead of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who waited weeks to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, or House Democrats, who did not issue subpoenas to all the witnesses they wanted to hear from, fearing a lengthy court battle. Instead, the House asked the Senate to seek testimony — a request that was ultimately denied.

Whether rushed or not, the impeachment was the fastest impeachment ever. The House vote to impeach Trump a week before Christmas, less than three months after Pelosi launched the impeachment inquiry.

After a four-week delay while Democrats pressed for rules changes to extend the trial, House Democrats carried the formal articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate in mid-January.

Three weeks later, the Senate voted to acquit Trump without new testimony or subpoenas.

Schumer said he had no regrets about the approach taken by Democrats. "We knew this was an uphill fight. We knew you needed two-thirds (of the Senate) to convict, we know that the president is a vindictive, nasty president who goes after anyone who opposes him, and we know that Republicans, even those who might know better, want to go in line with him,'' Schumer said last week.

Many senators who voted to acquit Trump said they were disappointed in his conduct or disapproved of it, but that it was up to voters to decide Trump's fate in November.

Alexander said House prosecutors had proved the charges against the president, but said they didn't rise to an impeachable offense.

“The question is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did,'' Alexander said last week in becoming the decisive vote against witnesses and documents. "I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa.''

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, called the president's actions “shameful and wrong.” But she said the proper response to Trump's behavior was “not to disenfranchise nearly 63 million Americans” — who voted for Trump in 2016 — by removing him from the ballot.

Legal precedent

An already ill-defined area of law may be even murkier for 2020 campaigns, thanks to an answer on foreign election interference from deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin.

Democrats pressed Trump's legal team to acknowledge that foreign election interference is not only wrong but also illegal. The answer from Philbin — basically, it depends — left some lawmakers outraged.

Asked if Trump agreed that foreign involvement in an American election is against the law, Philbin pointed out that the law only covers foreign campaign contributions or other so-called things of value. The Justice Department concluded for that reason that Trump's call with Ukraine's leader didn't violate campaign finance laws.

The law would not encompass “credible information” about someone running for office that voters should know about, Philbin said in a statement that Democrats called shocking.

“The single most important lesson that we learned from 2016 was that nobody should seek or welcome foreign interference in our elections," said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., an impeachment manager. “But now we have this president and his counsel essentially saying it is OK."