Trump Is Just Six Senate Votes Away From Impeachment
At some point in 2019 (if not sooner) a Republican Senator may walk into the Oval Office and say to President Trump: “Mr. President, we don’t have the votes,” at which point the Trump presidency will end in a resignation or a conviction in the Senate.
This scenario actually occurred forty-three years ago this summer when Republican Senator Barry Goldwater walked into the Oval Office and told Republican President Richard Nixon that they didn’t have the votes in the Senate to save his presidency.
Following impeachment in the House, a trial takes place in the Senate. Conviction requires two-thirds of the Senate and by my count there are already twelve senators who have shown a willingness to take on the president when they believe he is in the wrong.
If you add that to the forty-eight Democrats in the Senate (who have shown no inclination to work with this President), Donald Trump could be six votes away from conviction in the Senate.
Of course this assumes that the forces now in motion continue on their same trajectory and result in an impeachment vote. They are: the investigations into the Trump campaign;evidence of weakness in the Republican base ; historical trends indicating a possible Democratic takeover in the House; and, last but not least, defiance in the Senate. [1]
This last trend should be particularly worrisome for the president. Article I of the Constitution gives them the last word on the presidency. And yet instead of making friends in the Senate, Trump has done exactly the opposite.
After the Senate failed to pass his Obamacare replacement, Trump took to Twitter to denounce them as “fools” and “total quitters.” That could not have gone over well with the senators who opposed him along the way. One of them, Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), arrived home to an impromptu gathering of supporters at the Portland airport whoapplauded her vote against the president’s replacement of Obamacare.
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Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was defiant after being called out by the president, saying “ No second thoughts at all. None,” after her vote against the president on health care. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has been none too pleased with the efforts to repeal Obamacare, insisting that it “ does not go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families.”
But perhaps the most high profile opposition to the president came from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who returned to Washington from his hospital bed to cast the dramatic and final vote killing the Republican replacement for Obamacare. After Trump, during the presidential campaign, ridiculed McCain’s seven years in a prison camp in Hanoi, the Arizona senator showed he is clearly not afraid to take on the president.
Another Republican senator from the west, Dean Heller (R-Nev.) also felt free to criticize the President and vote against him on several key issues. Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) have been vocal in their opposition to the president’s budget—especially the proposed cuts in drug treatment programs.
Capito threatened to lead “a bipartisan group of my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee and in the Senate to reject those proposed cuts.” They are part of the 18 Republican senators who voted against the Trump budget.
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