GOP Senate Wipeout In 2020?

Will The GOP Get What's Coming To Them? Art by Mitch Dobrowner

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a centrist/libertarian DC think tank named for a Reagan economic advisor and staffed primarily with refugees from the CATO Institute. Yesterday,the NY Times published a somewhat hyperbolic op-ed he wrote, Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running In 2020. As if Trump was ever qualified be president, if not to run for president-- except in the narrowest of legalistic terms.

Wilkinson wrote that removing Trump in November 2020, at the ballot box, "is no longer a tenable position. The president’s bungled bid to coerce Ukraine’s leader into helping the Trump 2020 re-election campaign smear a rival struck 'decide it at the ballot box' off the menu of reasonable opinion forever. Mr. Trump’s brazen attempt to cheat his way into a second term stands so scandalously exposed that there can be no assurance of a fair election if he’s allowed to stay in office. Resolving the question of the president’s fitness at the ballot box isn’t really an option, much less the best option, when the question boils down to whether the ballot box will be stuffed." I get where he's coming from-- and where he's going. And I back impeachment. But let's tread lightly when it comes to democracy. Trump will in all likelihood be impeached by the House and found not guilty by the Senate. That makes removing him at the ballot box very tenable.

Wilkinson insisted that impeachment is "imperative, not only to protect the integrity of next year’s elections but to secure America’s continued democratic existence. If the House does its job, it will fall to Senate Republicans to reveal, in their decision to convict (or not), their preferred flavor of republic: constitutional or banana." I would say most of the Republicans in the Senate have long ago revealed that. There aren't nearly as many senators it would take to remove Trump. Just be happy he'll be forever tarred with having been impeached.

"What Impeachment Is: Impeachment is charging a holder of public office with misconduct. Here are answers to seven key questions about the process," writes Wilkerson but then makes me wonder if he's a pre-teen, which I assume he's not. "What the Accusation Is: President Trump is accused of breaking the law by pressuring the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation connected to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a potential Democratic opponent in the 2020 election."

No one knows what the impeachment charges will be against Trump, not Adam Schiff, not Jerry Nadler, not Nancy Pelosi and certainly not Will Wilkinson. Yes, the whistleblower complaint says that "White House officials believed they had witnessed President Trump abuse his power for political gain" and I don't doubt that will be part of any impeachment proceedings but Trump was committing criminal acts even before he was elected, before he was installed and on every day since. Let's see how this impeachment plays out before pretending we know.

Wilkinson noted that "Mike Murphy, a Republican election consultant, recently remarked that 'one Republican senator told me if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump.'" That was hyperbolic too and 30 is probably giving the Republicans in the Senate far too much credit. This session, Mitch McConnell has a 91.7% adhesion score to Trump. Seems high for someone with a functioning brain when you realize that Trump's instincts had him demanding that his aides cost out the price of his ideal way to fortify an electrified border wall with a moat stocked with "snakes or alligators. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh" and soldiers to shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down." No one knows for sure if Moscow Mitch would have voted for that one or not, but we do know that there are 4 senators who voted more consistently with Trump than even McConnell:

• Shelley Moore Capito (WV)- 95.7%
• Mike Crapo (ID)- 95.2%
• David Perdue (GA)- 94.7%
• Mike Rounds (SD)- 94.7%

And there are 13 Republicans whose Trump adhesion scores are identical with McConnell's:

• Martha McSally (AZ)
• John Cornyn (TX)
• Joni Ernst (IA)
• Chuck Grassley (IA)
• Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS)
• Mike Braun (IN)
• Pat Roberts (KS)
• Richard Shelby (AL)
• John Thune (SD)
• John Hoeven (ND)
• James Inhofe (OK)
• John Barrasso (WY)
• Mike Enzi (WY)

I wouldn't guess that any of these would necessarily vote for impeachment, but there are only 6 Republicans who have shown even the slightest degree of independence from Trump:

• Susan Collins (ME)- 33.3%
• Lisa Murkowski (AK)- 45.5%
• Jerry Moran (KS)- 47.8%
• Randy Paul (KY)- 50.0%
• Mike Lee (UT)- 52.2%
• Todd Young (IN)- 58.3%

Wilkinson: "Everyone understands that Mr. Trump is wildly popular with conservative voters, and that Senate Republicans would rather not invite primary challengers by alienating them. But when the legitimacy and preservation of our democracy are at stake, striving to keep a Senate seat safe through craven betrayal of the American people could come at a catastrophic price to the country." True, but these are careerists we're talking about here, not patriots.

It is now impossible to deny that Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden while holding up congressionally appropriated military assistance intended to help Ukraine stave off Russian aggression. Mr. Trump loudly admitted it, and the summary of his July phone conversation with Mr. Zelensky and the whistle-blower report cast it in the worst possible light. If Mr. Trump’s willing to cop to this, all while promoting an Infowars-level conspiracy theory to justify it, the American public can reasonably suspect that he’s abusing the powers of his office in other ways to fix the election in his favor.

Mr. Trump has supplied American voters with overwhelming reason to doubt that any election he participates in can be fair. That’s why he can’t be allowed to run for any public office, much less the presidency, ever again.

The president’s infamous call with Mr. Zelensky took place the day after the special counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his inquiry into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and Russian interference in the 2016 election. If Mr. Trump was elated that the testimony failed to unleash immediate impeachment hearings, he was also unnerved by the prospect of facing an indictment at the end of his time in office. The president knows he’s beyond the reach of criminal prosecution only so long as he commands the awesome powers of the executive branch.

The content of the “favors” Mr. Trump asked of the Ukrainian president underscore his feral resolve to barricade himself inside the Oval Office for at least five more years. His purpose in pressuring Mr. Zelensky to inquire into the Ukrainian whereabouts of an imaginary server and to beat the bushes for evidence of corruption involving Mr. Biden’s family was to drum up “evidence” that Russian election interference and his role in abetting it was nothing but a frame job fabricated by Ukrainians, in cahoots with the Democratic Party, to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.

It can be hard to grasp the point of all this. The point is that Mr. Trump is a great patriot who did nothing wrong, while the Democrat he views as the biggest threat to his continuing legal immunity is an illegitimate traitor. You see, if Mr. Mueller’s entire investigation was nothing but the continuation of a fabulously intricate conspiracy theory meant to undermine America’s democratic sovereignty, then Mr. Trump had to obstruct it to defend the republic. If Joe Biden was centrally involved in it, then he’s the corrupt threat to democracy. It’s a paranoid piece of fiction that would make Thomas Pynchon, or Vladimir Putin, proud.

This is the lunacy behind Mr. Trump’s willingness to casually endanger Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia. Worse, by ordering the attorney general, the secretary of state and his personal fixer to lend counterfeit substance to this ridiculous effort, he has untethered American diplomacy and law enforcement from reality.

If the House goes through with impeachment but the Senate acquits, Mr. Trump’s lawlessness will have been lavishly rewarded. He will take it as a signal that absolutely anything goes-- especially given the Senate’s failure to act in any meaningful way on election security. Should he win, a sizable majority of the public will see it as an electoral coup and deny the validity of his claim to power. It’s easy to imagine enormous mass protests that bring Washington to a halt, dangerous indeterminacy in the continuity of government, and worse.

If Senate Republicans hold their majority through an election that stinks of corruption, they’ll be dogged by the same crisis of legitimacy. If they nevertheless go on to use their dubious authority to continue stacking the courts and shielding the president from accountability, Americans won’t be wrong to conclude that our democracy has crumbled and that the United States has devolved into one of the world’s many soft-authoritarian kleptocracies claiming popular legitimacy from behind a cheap veneer of rigged elections. It can definitely happen here.

Senate Republicans who would vote in secret to remove Mr. Trump need to finally come to the defense of their country and do it in public. The odds of Republicans holding the Senate in a clean race are strong. But senators who choose to ignore the duties of their office in order to protect Mr. Trump will communicate with ringing clarity that they don’t care about having a fair election; that they don’t care whether the American people have really granted them the authority to govern; and that they think their own voters don’t care about any of this, either.

But the American people, Democrats and Republicans alike, do care. The fainthearted lions of the Senate ought to bear in mind that a defiant citizenry inflamed by indignation and jealous of its rights can overwhelm a corrupt regime’s dirty electoral plans. An election with an impeached Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket is an invitation to an electoral uprising that should haunt Mitch McConnell’s dreams.

Senate Republicans owe us the courage of their private convictions. If they can’t find it, they should at least be wary of assuming that cultlike devotion to the president will allow them to weather the coming storm, or that, in the end, they will be rewarded for a faithless calculation to regard their constituents with contempt.

The only Senate Republicans I can honestly see being defeated in 2020 for voting to find Trump innocent of even the strongest and least contestable impeachment charges are Susan Collins (ME), Dan Sullivan (AK), Cory Gardner (CO) and Martha McSally (AZ). If viable Democrats are nominated-- which Schumer is working furiously to make sure doesn't happen-- Joni Ernst (IA), John Cornyn (TX), Thom Tillis (NC) and David Perdue (GA) could also lose their seats... and if the anti-Trump wave is a genuine tsunami, America might be able to say goodbye to Steve Daines (MT), Mitch McConnell (KY) and Ben Sasse (NE) as well.