Tuesday marked day one of Donald Trump’s Senate Impeachment trial, and it went exactly as expected: The Senate voted to block Democrats’ from subpoenaing White House documents and witnesses in the proceedings.
The votes cast along party lines saw all Republicans vote with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to kill Sen. Chuck Schumer’s motion to not just subpoena documents and records from the State Department and the Department of Defense, but also to block Mick Mulvaney testifying as a witness.
The count stood at 53-47.
Watching this impeachment trial, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future of American democracy is now in question. It’s reached the precipice of confirmation and renewal on one side, and quasi expiration on the other. Senate Republicans will choose one or the other.
— Evan McMullin (@EvanMcMullin) January 22, 2020
Unfortunately, 69% of Americans don’t share GOP’s sentiment and want a “fair trial.”
According to CNN’s latest poll conducted by SRSS, seven in 10 Americans want the Senate trial to have testimony from new witnesses that weren’t a part of the House impeachment inquiry.
51% say the Senate should vote to convict President Trump and remove him from office in the trial.
Without documents and witnesses, this isn’t a trial. It's a coverup.https://t.co/yVCuFHYfdv
— Tom Steyer (@TomSteyer) January 21, 2020
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer even said that the public was “understanding how unfair Senator McConnell’s trial rules are…” But some pundits are enraged that the public isn’t doing enough.
For instance, journalist Charles P. Pierce wrote a scathing commentary in Esquire on how the “American public has now proved that it will tolerate just about anything except sign-stealing in baseball and a bad decision on The Bachelor.”
Frankly, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get an anesthetized citizenry to realize what a threat the country is facing in having a criminal idiot as a chief executive, a guy who has put every part of the republic up for sale, and for cheap. https://t.co/3TU9QyeCwt
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 21, 2020
But as the Daily Kos notes, American voters are in charge and “We should all be outraged”:
This is in the hands of American voters more than ever. Get involved. Raise a fuss. Cause good trouble. The more pressure these GOP senators get now, the better. The more stories that are reported about them abandoning their oaths of office amid public outrage, the more educated and outraged the public will become and the more likely the GOP majority will be to get the boot come November. Onward!”