Guilty But Acquitted 

Presidents Day: The Senate jury is in, Trump was acquitted.  What that means for the future of Trumpism remains unclear.  Although there was a brief kerfuffle about calling witnesses ultimately the House impeachment team decided to move forward without doing so, likely because the diversion from Biden’s legislative priorities wasn’t worth the time combined with threats by Trump’s lawyers that they would waste even more time by calling their own witnesses, like Nancy Pelosi, as well as concerns that the Democratic team would lose one or more of their expected Republicans votes.  Witnesses or not, the Democrats did what they set out to do.  Helped along by the video record and recollections from Washington state Republican Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Butler who shared an account of a conversation between GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and Trump indicating that Trump refused to call off the Capitol onslaught despite McCarthy’s pleas and another by Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville that Trump knew that Mike Pence had come close to being nabbed by the insurrectionists, they provided a convincing  case for conviction.  Unfortunately, led by their leader Mitch McConnell who late Friday told his crowd that he planned to vote to acquit Trump, all but seven Republicans put party over country by voting to acquit.  Notably six of those acquitting Senators (Blunt, Portman, Thune, Crapo, Moran and Wicker)  had voted to impeach Bill Clinton back when they were members of the House and five of them (McConnell, Graham, Grassley, Inhofe and Shelby) had voted Clinton guilty because obviously lying about sex is so much worse than insurrection. Turning to the Republican Senators who joined with all the Democrats by voting Trump guilty, two of them, North Carolina’s Richard Burr and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, will be retiring from the Senate in 2022.  Three of them, including Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Maine’s Susan Collins, just won reelection.  One is Utah’s Mitt Romney, who may or may not have plans to run for reelection when his term is up in 2024 but who has already established that though he’s reliably conservative he votes how he wants when he wants and the last is Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski who is up for reelection in 2022 but who last time won her reelection as a write-in after she lost the Republican primary, giving her a degree of independence that a lot of her gutless Republican colleagues lack.  Immediately following the vote, Mitch McConnell delivered a surprisingly frank speech where he made it clear that he firmly believed that Trump was guilty of inciting the insurrection but voted for acquittal because the Democrats had failed to hold the trial while Trump was still in office, blaming them for a decision he made, and because an out of office president couldn’t be impeached, a false conclusion that he knows is false.  McConnell went on to say that it was now up to the justice system to go after Trump for all of his crimes and while there’s a good chance that the system will, tying Trump in expensive knots for years, McConnell’s decision and his speech were classic McConnell, full of faux righteousness and a nod to the Republican donor class that they shouldn’t be put off by Trump, QAnon, or his party’s all too large white supremacist wing, that they should open their pockets to help him regain his Senate leadership position.

What’s Next? Immediately following the vote, Trump announced plans to go back on the road to make America great again, his way of teasing another run for the presidency and/or an excuse to line his pockets.  Reportedly he’s already working on plans to primary the Senators and Representatives who voted against him.  Lindsey Graham announced that he plans to head to Mar a Lago for some golf and to discuss strategy with his good buddy, he also threatened that “when” his party takes back control of the House and Senate that they’ll impeach Kamala Harris, as payback. That strategy that Graham plans to discuss includes begging Trump to share his donor list, something that GOP Leader McCarthy asked for but did not get during his recent lunch visit. The desire to get that list partially explains why Graham endorsed Lara Trump for the soon to be open North Carolina Senate being vacated Burr. As to Burr, like Cassidy, his state’s Republican party is censuring him for his somewhat unexpected guilty vote.  Burr’s vote was a bit surprising, but its worth remembering that until he got embroiled in a Trump Justice department investigated insider trading scandal he served as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee where he had shown a degree of independence that had put him in Trump’s crosshairs.  Its not a coincidence that Burr got more heat for the relatively small amount of trading he did after learning about the seriousness of the incoming pandemic than anyone else, including those two Georgia Senators who lost their reelection bids, largely because of Trump’s big election lies.  The bottom line, there will be far too much Trump going forward, the question is whether his legal woes overwhelm his efforts to maintain control of the Republican Party and/or run again for president.  On that last point, his biggest supporters are also those with their own presidential aspirations.  They want his support, don’t want to offend his base, but in their heart of hearts want to see him slip away.  Already, one of his fans, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is on record telling Politico that maybe, just maybe her party should have called him out sooner.  For their parts Senator Rubio, who may or may not be primaried by Ivanka, and former Secretary of State Pompeo are tweeting Bible verses.  Ted Cruz has a new white supremacist hairdo and Josh Hawley is doing his best to resuscitate his career. 

Human Resources:  The Democrats lost their first team member after White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo who had threatened a reporter over her story about his relationship with an Axios reporter resigned.  Initially he had been punished with a one week suspension, but was ultimately pushed out when the story about him refused to go away.  Ducklo, who was earlier diagnosed with advanced lung cancer probably was being given more latitude by Biden’s team due to his health struggles, but given Biden’s position that no one on his team will ever be allowed to act inappropriately, that cover wasn’t enough to save him. The Senate is on holiday hiatus this week, so confirmation hearings and votes will remain on hold until their return.  Keep an eye on OMB nominee Neera Tandan, it turns out that she didn’t just tweet Trump attacks, her tweet history also includes quite a few Bernie Sanders zingers.  He chairs the Budget Committee so her fate rests in his hands.   Also, keep an eye on the Lincoln Project, those are the Republicans who came out swinging for Trump. Turns out that one of their now prior members was caught propositioning too young men, another one of their members, a woman, left after accusing them of being boys club and now Steve Schmidt the former McCain campaign strategist has left their board. It’s not totally clear that the Lincoln Project ads did much damage to Trumpy candidates but they did agitate Trump so it would be nice if these guys can get their act back together. In any case, their remaining members are unlikely to go away entirely, more likely, if their Lincoln brand becomes too tarnished, they’ll just reappear under a different name.          

Viral Musings:  Coronavirus cases are down but at this point the decline is due mostly to the end of the holiday season surges rather than the rollout of the vaccine.  That said, vaccinations are up significantly with a number of states opening up criteria for the still limited, but growing, amount of available shots.  The news out Pfizer’s test case country, Israel, is really good.  Yesterday Reuters reported on a study by Israel’s largest health care provider that after both doses of the Pfizer vaccine people are 94% less likely to have symptomatic COVID infections.  In New York one time virus hero Andrew Cuomo is taking heat for the way he handled COVID positive nursing home patients last Spring. The issue centers on whether he should have sent COVID positive patients released from hospitals that needed what was then a scarily short supply of beds back to their nursing homes or whether he should have found them another place to go, as if there was another place at that point.  The issue is complicated by how deaths of nursing homes patients who died in hospitals were counted and whether including them as hospital deaths obfuscated the nursing home problem.  Cuomo is the favorite punching bag of local, and for that matter national, Republicans and left wing Democrats so it’s hard to tell if he willfully hid information or if this is some combination of a fog of war situation and a political hit of a very vocal visible target. In any case, given the number of mourning families, political pundits looking for a high profile target, the attention of State Attorney General Tish James and Cuomo’s rambunctious personality we’re likely to be hearing about this for some time.   

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52,884,400 shots in arms