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Democrats – and more than a few Never-Trump Republicans – hoped that Mitch McConnell could vote with them to condemn Donald Trump when his second impeachment reaches the Senate. McConnell’s vote on Tuesday in opposition to the impeachment made it clear that this will not happen. Here’s what wasn’t clear: whether and why he changed his mind.
It has been just three weeks since two incumbent Republican senators lost their seats in a runoff election in Georgia, handing over Senate control to Democrats and referring McConnell to the abandoned minority leader. The day after Georgia’s second round, advisers say, McConnell was furious.
For four years as a majority leader, he worked closely with the White House to secure what will be Donald Trump’s most enduring domestic legacy: the appointment of nearly 300 federal judges and three Supreme Court judges. But McConnell and Trump’s relationship was a marriage of convenience. Personally and temperamentally, they were oil and water. The Kentucky senator has a reverence for the institution he chaired; he mastered his intricate rules and always tried to play “the long game”, as he titled his memoir. Trump was erratic; he didn’t give a damn about tradition and had little discipline about what he said or how he said it.
And when, after losing the November election to Joe Biden, Trump criticized the Republican governor of Georgia and his secretary of state for presiding over what Trump insisted was a major electoral fraud in his state, McConnell was furious. He believed that Trump’s effort to undermine Georgia’s final vote count – which Biden won – cost the Republican Party both seats in the Senate because it dissuaded many of its supporters from voting for Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue again. .
Then came January 6. Trump supporters at a “Stop the Steal” rally raided and looted McConnell’s beloved Capitol after a speech by the president. The majority leader, it seemed, was fed up. His wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s transport secretary, resigned the next day. On January 19, McConnell said publicly: ” The crowd was fed with lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. “With the House having voted for Trump’s impeachment and a Senate impeachment trial approaching, that language suggested that McConnell might actually be open to a sentencing vote – a prospect that could lead other Republican senators to join him.
Yesterday, that prospect seemed to disappear. Forty-five Republican senators voted in favor of the motion, filed by McConnell’s colleague in Kentucky, Rand Paul, saying the impeachment of an out-of-office president was unconstitutional. McConnell was one of 45. The vote makes it all but certain that Trump will be acquitted when he is tried next month. (Democrats need 17 Republican senators to join them in the vote to condemn.)
It looked like a U-turn. But a senior Republican National Committee source who is friends with McConnell, as well as several of his top advisers, said Newsweek the perception that the senator was ready to condemn Trump is distorted. (Everyone was given anonymity to be frank.) ” Was he angry? Yes. Did he break up with Trump? Yes. But did that mean he would vote to condemn and get Republican votes to condemn? I don’t think so, “said the RNC source.” He called it a ‘vote of conscience’. You don’t whip vows of conscience. “
McConnell, says another friend of his, had honest and substantive doubts about the impeachment constitutionality of a resident who was no longer in office. In addition, he dismissed the House vote as a “farce. No due process, no hearing, nothing.” Even if McConnell thought that what Trump did was worth the impeachment – and he really can, this source says – “he is an institutionalist, he wants things to be done correctly. He thought that what the House did in this case was half-hearted. “
There were also political calculations, of course. McConnell knows that impeachment ignites Trump’s already furious base. He also emphasizes schisms in the Republican Party: several of the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment now have opponents in the primaries in 2022, including Liz Cheney, the House’s third Republican. Any Republican senator who does the same is likely to have the same fate.
McConnell, friends say, has some hope that Trump’s influence will diminish somewhat in the coming years, as the country moves forward. Impeachment works against this. In the Trump world, McConnell knows, it’s another complaint the former president can use to set his base on fire and raise money for a possible future campaign.
McConnell also knows that Trump left the Republicans who remained in Washington with ” an absolute mess, “said the RNC source.” And Mitch is one of the main people who need to try to clean it up. “He may not vote to convict Trump at the next Senate trial – which would be incongruous after voting that the whole process is unconstitutional -” but make no mistake, he is not a happy camper. “