As verbiage on the U.S. Senate floor and in the television studios spews into the emptiness of excess, let us forge through the fog. Let us proceed directly to the basic political analysis of this basic political exercise.
The Republican Senate leadership is saying, in essence, that, yes, it intends to round-file damaging new evidence and acquit Donald Trump on impeachment uneventfully and quickly. It says it's because the Democratic House rushed first--to impeach for impeachment's sake with an incomplete case.
Republicans are saying, essentially, that Trump did what he is accused of doing and shouldn't have done it, but that it wasn't as horrible as the Democrats let on. Ukraine got its money and didn't smear Joe Biden.
Senate Republicans are saying that if they have four defections requiring them to call witnesses--and they don't think they will because their wafflers are wussies--then they'll limit the new-witness testimony to depositions and claim executive privilege or national security to deny public dissemination of anything severely damaging.
They'll be able to do that because U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts intends merely to direct traffic, not presume constitutional authority to make truly "presiding" rulings.
Roberts knows this is the Senate's trial and that the Senate will make the rules. He wouldn't have it any other way. He's got enough to do negotiating a 4-4 tie on his court. He will not presume, thank you, to tell the U.S. Senate what to do on its floor and in the conduct of its business.
It's not that Roberts favors Republicans or Democrats, nor that he agrees more with one or the other. It's that he doesn't want to have to say, and simply will not. It would harm the court to politicize it in a pedestrian manner beyond the more thoughtful political differences that dominate it now.
House Democrats are saying, essentially, that, yes, they rushed to get Trump impeached before the presidential primary season got into full gear. They're saying they did so fully aware that the Senate would not convict. They're saying they acted on the premise that these revelations are important and damning and should and will prove politically harmful to Trump and Republican members of Congress seeking re-election.
House Democrats like that polls show more than half of respondents saying Trump did wrong and should be removed from office.
Senate Republicans counter that that means nothing--that it is no more than Trump's permanently upside-down approval rating. He won with low public approval in 2016 and could win with it again because eventually he'll get compared to a stand-alone Democratic alternative.
Anyway, Republicans are saying that the country has demonstrated twice already this century that it doesn't make a darn under our rules that Democrats almost always get more popular votes for president. It's a matter of how those votes are distributed, which works to Republicans' favor because they are strongest in areas that get electoral votes and Senate seats all out of proportion to their sparse population.
Expansive conservative states with more moose or corn stalks than people get two senators and two Senate-based electors just like big liberal states with people living on top of each other. That's the math that rules.
That 51 percent of Americans are said by a poll to want Trump removed--bully for that, Republicans say. Thank goodness all those people are bunking in the same block out in California and limited to the same number of Senate-generated presidential electors as the big-sky country of Montana, Republicans will say.
In those vast and sparsely populated conservative states, the primary Republican consideration is the Trumpian base, not swing voters.
For all those reasons, the White House is said to be less worried right now about impeachment than ... get this ... Michael Bloomberg.
It's not that Trump and his political team have decided that Bloomberg will be the Democratic nominee, though it's conceivable. It's that Bloomberg's strategy is to spend nearly a quarter-billion dollars of his personal fortune by March 3 doing two things.
One is to build himself up as a Super Tuesday alternative to a weak Democratic field.
But the other--the one getting Trump's attention--is to heap negativity on Trump in those TV buys and do so not only in Super Tuesday states, but in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump won narrowly because about 70,000 swing voters swung his way.
Bloomberg is an unprecedented blessing to Democrats in that he is lathering a literal fortune of negatives on Trump during a season in which Trump might otherwise escape them, being essentially unopposed on his own side while Democrats do internal combat.
Now Bloomberg has put up an ad saying Trump should be removed from office. That's much more consequential than Adam Schiff saying it on the Senate floor.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/23/2020