This Will Not Pass by Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns

Author:Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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On January 11, House Democrats introduced a single article of impeachment, accusing Trump of “inciting violence against the government of the United States.”

The next day, the New York Times reported that McCarthy and McConnell were angry at Trump and that McConnell believed the president’s actions were impeachable. The Senate leader’s office declined to comment for the story, other than referring back to McConnell’s censorious remarks on the night of January 6.

The story sent a wave of anxiety through the Senate Republican Conference. If McConnell was seriously considering a vote to convict Trump, he had not told any of them. Many of them were eager to know McConnell’s intentions and worried about divisions in their ranks. A few had been rattled the previous weekend by Trump supporters who hectored them in airports. (A crowd at Washington’s National Airport had berated Lindsey Graham: “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”)

John Thune was out to dinner with his wife that evening when his phone began lighting up with calls and texts from his colleagues. Another concerned senator called one of the authors of this book to ask why McConnell had not challenged the accuracy of the story: Surely he was not actually going to vote for conviction—was he?

McConnell did nothing to attack the story, since he knew it to be accurate. But neither did he immediately issue a clarifying comment. When Thune relayed the concerns of the conference to its leader, McConnell said he appreciated the feedback, but not much more. Thune urged the leader to put out a statement saying, well, something about his present thinking.

McConnell stalled. Despite his private talk, casting that week as a moment for leadership, he was seemingly unready to go public with his enthusiasm for impeachment. Nor was he willing to shoot down the idea outright and give his senators an easy way out of a tough decision.

With McConnell keeping his own counsel, someone else stepped forward to supply his Senate colleagues with political armor.

J. Michael Luttig was a longtime federal appeals court judge who had spent the George W. Bush administration waiting for a Supreme Court nomination that never came. He had stepped down from the bench for a lucrative job at Boeing, but the former clerk to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was still active in the close-knit conservative legal world. On the night before the House voted to impeach Trump, he published an opinion piece in the Washington Post arguing that the Senate could not convict the president after he left office.

“Trump would no longer be incumbent in the Office of the President at the time of the delayed Senate proceeding and would no longer be subject to ‘impeachment conviction’ by the Senate, under the Constitution’s Impeachment Clauses,” Luttig wrote.

It was a hotly disputed argument, with significant legal and historical evidence lined up against it. But Trump’s Senate allies lunged at the column like a drowning man at a life preserver. Here, it seemed, was a pretext for not convicting Trump that would skirt the issue of his evident culpability.

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