‘This has never been in doubt.’ Kansas and Missouri senators vote to acquit Trump
All four Republican senators from Kansas and Missouri voted to acquit President Donald Trump Wednesday in the nation’s third presidential impeachment trial.
In the lead-up to the historic 52-48 vote, the four senators laid out their rationales for clearing Trump of abuse of power and obstruction charges after a Senate trial without witnesses.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, blasted impeachment in a floor speech Wednesday as a “pipe dream of politicians,” which he argued hindered lawmakers from tackling other issues such as expanding broadband in rural areas and combating human trafficking.
Hawley, a former Missouri attorney general and the youngest member of the Senate, emerged from the trial process as one the most visible faces in opposition to removing Trump. He said in an interview after his speech that the House did not allege any unlawful conduct in its articles of impeachment, which made his decision easy.
He noted that the House did not actually charge Trump with crime of bribery despite referencing it during the Senate trial.
“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors where they say, well, really it’s akin to bribery, I think is what (New York Rep.) Hakeem Jefferies said, and then (California Rep.) Adam Schiff said, we basically alleged bribery. Well, they haven’t because they can’t,” Hawley said.
“Because it’s not unlawful for the president to ask that an investigation be launched on corruption. It’s not unlawful to do any of those things.”
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, was the only GOP member to vote to convict Trump, leaving the Senate well short of the two-thirds majority needed to remove a president from office. Romney is the only senator in history to vote to convict a president from his own party.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, a member of GOP leadership, told reporters Monday that the outcome of the trial was never in question. He said a partisan impeachment in the Democratic-controlled House had resulted in a partisan trial in the GOP-controlled Senate.
“If you reported this ever as if it was in doubt, I don’t think that was reporting the facts. This has never been in doubt,” Blunt said.
Asked about the message an acquittal vote would send to Trump and future presidents, Blunt pointed to the House.
“I hope the message to future House members is you’ve got to put a case together that you can bring to the Senate,” Blunt said.
Blunt reiterated this message Wednesday on the Senate floor, arguing that the House should have gone to court to fight the administration for witnesses and documents after the White House refused to cooperate, rather than shifting the responsibility to the Senate.
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, also accused the House of shirking its duty in a statement released shortly before senators were called to the chamber to cast their votes.
“Unwilling to give the judicial system the time to answer important questions of privilege in regards to specific witnesses that the House managers claimed were key to the case, the House moved forward with impeachment,” Moran said in a statement.
“The House managers argued at the beginning of the trial that they had overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment. It was surprising then that the House managers attempted to burden the Senate with issuing subpoenas and taking testimony from those witnesses that the House failed to pursue.”
Moran was the only senator from the Kansas City area not to speak ahead of the vote, but in his statement said Trump’s actions fell short of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” required to remove a president under the constitution.
Both Blunt and Moran voted to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998 as members of the U.S. House.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, a juror during Clinton’s 1999 Senate trial who voted to remove him from office, cautioned against comparing then and now. “They’re two different things entirely,” he said Tuesday on his way into the Senate chamber.
But Roberts then said both impeachment trials had divided the country and he expressed his hope that the division would heal after the trial.
In his floor speech Tuesday, Roberts lamented that House Democrats, who served as prosecutors, tried to put the Senate on trial with their rhetoric. He focused on the House’s impertinence rather than specific details of Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate potential opponent and former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Roberts has been on Capitol Hill for a half-century, serving as a congressional staffer for 12 years before being elected to Congress in 1980. On his way into the chamber, he reflected how when he arrived in Washington in 1968 to work for Kansas Sen. Frank Carlson, the country was in the midst of deep conflict.
“These are not the worst of times,” Roberts in a preview of his speech. “I mean, when I came here it wasn’t two weeks later that MLK was assassinated. We had Marines on the Capitol steps, sandbags, ammunition and the place was burning. We had Vietnam. We had Watergate. We had all of these things that really tore us apart, but we always come back together.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, who grew up in Johnson County, called it a somber day in the Senate ahead of what promises to be a party line vote to acquit the president.
Kaine, who was Democrat Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate in 2016, said he approached Chief Justice John Roberts and thanked him for presiding over the trial with dignity. Roberts replied that it was a historic honor.
“And I said, ‘I bet both you and I are both thinking the same thing that we hope it’s a once-in-the-lifetime honor,’” Kaine said. “You never want to be in an impeachment trial. I never want to be in one again.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 1:12 PM.
