If Conviction Comes Down To Marco Rubio Or Pat Toomey Proving They Have A Spine...

Spineless-- The GOP by Nancy Ohanian

"Look, nothing is going gently into the night at the end of this drama, no matter who wins. Nixon was a reflection of Nixon. Watergate was not about the country. It was, above all, about Nixon. The Trump story is all tied up with the country itself. I felt even before this started that we are in a cold civil war. And Trump has brought the cold civil war to the point of near ignition."
-Carl Bernstein

Friday night, on CNN, one of the cast fromTrump's reality show-- Anthony Scaramucci-- said, flatly, "The American president is a traitor to the United States." The following morning, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich write for The Guardian that Trump is the kid with his hand in the cookie jar-- and Republicans know it. Reich was feeling hopeful though-- even optimistic. Hopeful and optimistic that the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate just might remove the treasonous monster from office after all. Reich thinks he'll be impeached as soon as Thanksgiving and that "the odds are rising that he’ll be convicted in the Senate... A majority of Americans now support his impeachment. Trump refuses to allow any administration official to appear before the House committees considering impeachment. No matter, because Congress doesn’t need more evidence. The cookie is in plain sight. Everyone has seen Trump’s hand in the jar."

House Democrats will vote to impeach, but will Senate Republicans vote to convict? Until now that seemed implausible. Democrats hold 47 Senate seats. If they all vote to convict, 20 Republicans would have to join them in order to have the necessary two-thirds of the Senate.

What was implausible is now possible. If the vote were held in secret, says Republican strategist Mike Murphy, 30 Republicans would vote today for impeachment. Former Republican senator Jeff Flake puts the likely number at 35.

Will they go public? Twenty-three Republicans are up for re-election next fall. Most are from red states that support Trump. But in a few months they’ll be safe from primary challenges. They’ll be free to vote him out.

Others-- Susan Collins of Maine, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rob Portman of Ohio, for example-- are from purple states where they’ll be challenged by a Democrat and have every incentive to vote Trump out. Trump has no leverage over long-serving senators planning to retire, such as Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Meanwhile, he’s losing support among responsible Senate Republicans like Mitt Romney of Utah, who calls his actions “troubling in the extreme,” Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, who urges colleagues not to “circle the wagons,” and intelligence chair Richard Burr of North Carolina, who vows to “get to the bottom” of what happened.

Trump remains hugely popular among Republican voters but most of them care more about the economy than about Trump, and the economy is slowing-- in large part because of Trump’s trade wars.

The manufacturing sector is contracting. Spending on warehouses, offices and factories is falling. Agriculture is taking a big hit. A fifth of the economy is effectively in recession. In September, wage growth slowed to weakest pace in more than a year.

It’s still unlikely Trump will be pushed out of office before the 2020 election but the odds are rising by the day. And Trump knows it, which is causing him to behave more like a wild child who deserves to be impeached.

I respect Reich, but depending on Ben Sasse, Rob Portman, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Mitt Romney or any of those clowns growing a spine, is going to leave everyone very, very disappointed. In Newsweek Friday, Shane Croucher asserted that his party will break with him if they see themselves losing in 2020. He wrote that "Only when Republicans believe they are going to lose the White House and both chambers of Congress in the 2020 election will they rescind their support" of Señor Trumpanzee. This is based on the opinions of Brian Klaas, an assistant professor at University College London in England and I'm even willing to grant him something like that... but will they really be able to see that-- but... in their own constituencies, which is another calculation-- before November of 2020?

Covering Up The Cover Up by Nancy Ohanian

Klaas, who does a column for the Washington Post, wrote that because "Republicans will likely break with Trump if they suspect they will lose the presidency, the House, and the Senate in 2020, now would be a very good time to sign-up to volunteer for a campaign; to donate; to register voters; and to protest so that surge of activism is visible... Watergate looks like a couple of teenage kids shoplifting a pack of gum in comparison to this scandal...Every day, something that was previously unthinkable becomes routine. And that's how democracies eventually die."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. But the backbones aren't there. Nor is the patriotism, the willingness to put country over party-- let alone career-- apparent in the men and women who have to make the calculation. To be honest, I'd bet that Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Doug Jones (D-AL), would vote against conviction sooner than Joni Ernst (R-IA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Martha McSally (R-AZ), David Perdue (R-GA), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) or Steve Daines (R-MT)-- all up for reelection next year-- would vote for it. And it's not even likely to come to that. Moscow Mitch has already signaled he'll immediately call a procedural vote to dismiss the charges within seconds of the impeachment trial beginning in the Senate. That will come down to a strict party line vote and that would immediately end the Trump impeachment saga.

No Republican wants to wake up and see a thread like this from Trumpanzee and his zombie supporters

Good news there, though. Democrats would be almost guaranteed to win back the Senate and the GOP would likely lose Senate seats it holds in Colorado, North Carolina, Maine, Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Georgia (one) and possibly Kansas and Kentucky. [Caveat: don't get too excited because Chuck Schumer and the DSCC are working hard to make sure nominees are corrupt conservative careerists who will never vote for fundamental change. Please help thwart Schumer here.]