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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram. You may have noticed we took Monday off, didn't explain yesterday. That's because it was a long weekend in the United States, President's Day weekend, a weekend dedicated to Washington, Lincoln, and the rest of the guys who have held the country's highest office. And this was a President's Day weekend to remember because the United States Senate spent it concluding the second impeachment trial of the nation's 45th president, Donald John Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution? That's a high crime and misdemeanor. If that's not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing. This was history on history on history. The United States Senate, for the second time, deliberating on whether to convict the former president for wrongdoing, this time for inciting an insurrection on the United States Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, has been covering it. All in all, basically, the narrative presented by House Democrats was one in which the president had spent months convincing people that the greatest political scandal in American history was happening, an election stolen from under their feet. We have in all swing states major infractions or outright fraud. If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can't be president. Then he told all of those people to gather in Washington, D.C., outside of Congress, while Congress was doing basically the last step in certifying the results of the election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president's tweet says the protest will take place on January 6th. That's Wednesday. And the same day Congress meets to formally count the votes cast by the Electoral College. Then he gave an angry and violent speech in which he seemed to encourage them to take action. and then literally told them to go to Capitol Hill. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then, of course, they go into the insurrection itself. And here's some of the most compelling evidence, I think, in the House manager's case. because they showed a bunch of footage from the attack on the Capitol that's really, really harrowing, right? Including one where Senator Mitt Romney is just moments away from the mob. And I watched a cut of the footage that zooms in on his face. Just beneath them, the mob had already started to search for the Senate chamber. You can tell that it's Romney. You can see the concern on his face because he's actually running away from these people as they're attacking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's also footage from the attackers in this. talking about how they're acting on Trump's will, they're doing things on behalf of the president, that they are there because he told them to be there. We weren't invited here! We weren't invited! We weren't invited here! It's not just that one can trace, like, a causal pathway. It's that the rioters themselves said that it's because of Trump that they were there, that they were acting on his behalf.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does the president's defense team counter-argue? Are you familiar with the word whataboutism? Sure, yeah. This phrase, which originated in the Cold War, basically, when you're invoking a bad thing that somebody else does, you distract from the obviously indefensible behavior that your side is doing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It originated in the Cold War because the Soviets would do this all the time to counter American arguments about atrocities they were committing against their own people. And I went on this extended digression about the Cold War because it's actually the main argument that was presented by Trump's impeachment lawyers. It was that other people used language that was kind of like Trump's, and especially Democrats did that. And there weren't any riots, and nobody got mad at them, and no one tried to kick them out of public office. Therefore, why should you be doing the same thing to Trump?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was like the former president told his followers to fight, and here's a clip of Vice President Harris using the word fight in a political speech. It literally was like that. And of course, the Democrat House managers know that the word fight has been used figuratively in political speech forever. It's best to listen to them. We've got to keep fighting and keep focused. We will fight when we must fight. We've been fighting, so we need to fight, but we also need to fight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their argument is any political rhetoric that uses the word fight must be metaphorical, which is a very silly argument, right? Sometimes people in political rhetoric are calling for actual violence or at the very least are speaking in such a situation where metaphorical language could be interpreted as literal regardless of intent. And they need to be more careful about what they're saying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whichever one you think Trump was, the end result indicates that he was in fact playing with fire. So a very strong argument made by impeachment managers against the former president, a very weak argument made by his defense team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's the final vote? It is a 57-43 vote to acquit. 57-43 means that the majority voted in favor— A historic majority. Yes, in fact, it's historic. It's the most bipartisan ever. You had seven Republicans de facto and yet it still wasn't close enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How come The simple answer is partisanship. Republicans have a variety of reasons why they don't want to break with Trump. A lot of people who are on the Republican side are worrying about them being replaced by Marjorie Taylor Greene type, a true believer. And there are some of those in the Senate too, or at least you think there might be, people who really genuinely believe what Trump is saying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then another rationale is not so much fear of primary concerns as it is viability in one's own primary bid in 2024 to run the Republican ticket. And so you've got people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton who are united by the fact that they want to be president one day. And to do that, they need to court the Trump vote. And courting the Trump vote means not voting to convict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk about the Senate minority leader for a moment here. Mitch McConnell had signaled that he was open to hearing the arguments made by the Democratic impeachment managers. They made a very compelling argument, and he still didn't break ranks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know why? So McConnell seemed like he was ready to jettison Trump, especially after he literally endangered his personal safety in life. But something didn't happen, and that's enough Republicans defecting that McConnell felt like he could shepherd his entire caucus towards voting to convict Trump, or at least a large enough number of it, that it wouldn't break up and lead to a sort of real crack up in the Republican Party over this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there were some rumblings, most notably in a CNN piece, that an open break between McConnell and Trump would lead to him losing his leadership position. In his speech, he points to the fact that the issue here is constitutional. You can't impeach a president who's no longer in office. If President Trump were still in office, I would have carefully considered whether the House managers proved their specific charge. But in this case, the question is moot because former President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even though, if I have this right, McConnell is responsible for this trial happening once the former president vacated his office. It was McConnell who delayed the trial, no? Correct. Correct. That, to me, is the single biggest indicator of how transparently political all of this is. His rationale was something that he could have addressed if he was sincerely concerned about it. If you really thought that what you would be doing was creating a situation in which the trial itself or an unconstitutional proceeding, then you wouldn't have scheduled it when you scheduled it or forced it to be scheduled when you forced it to be scheduled more accurately.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, let's talk about members of his party who perhaps voted with their conscience instead of making a nakedly political move here. Who are the seven? Some of them are familiar. So you've got Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump the last time. Then you have Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, both of whom are known to be much more moderate than the rest of the Republican Senate caucus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ben Sasse from Nebraska, who is like trying to build his brand as a thoughtful Republican. Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, who's very conservative. But Toomey was very offended by the way that Trump impugned the integrity of the Pennsylvania political system. See, one of the problems is the campaign officials, they go on TV and they make all kinds of shocking allegations of fraud. Then they go into a courtroom where there are consequences for lying to a judge. Right. They don't make those allegations anymore. And so it seems in part that he was reacting to Trump's attack on the election in its entirety.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then you've got Richard Burr from North Carolina, who was a real surprise. He actually voted to say the trial was unconstitutional itself, but then said, look, once we've determined this trial is constitutional, I had to listen to the evidence. And once I listened to the evidence, then Trump should have been convicted. Burr said in part, quote, the evidence is compelling that President Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection. Therefore, I have voted to convict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the last one, who's surprising on a number of levels, is Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana. Cassidy is running for re-election. He's up again in 2026, which means he's very vulnerable to a primary challenge on these grounds. And in a surprise vote, basically saying he was persuaded by the case that House Democrats made. And it's like, it's odd, right, to hear a senator saying that their vote was actually grounded in what happened on the Senate floor. What an inspiration. Yeah, it's kind of nice and refreshing. But it almost seems like that's what actually happened. Like, he's not just making stuff up, but it's serious. He believes it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, if I'm an impartial juror and one side's doing a great job and the other side's doing a terrible job on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, I'm going to vote for the side that did the good job. And how's that working out for the Republican senators who maybe surprised their states, their constituents, with a vote against the former president?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, for three out of the seven, Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, you just kind of don't really expect that much would happen, and it hasn't so far because this is what people expect from them. So those three look to be pretty safe. Then you have Pat Toomey, who's retiring, so it's possible that the Pennsylvania Republican Party doesn't really care. And then for the remaining three, they've all been censured either by the state Republican Party or by a county-level Republican Party in their home state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The state and local-level Republican parties are sending a clear signal that they are still very much on the Trump train. More with Zach in a minute.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Zach, just to recap here, Democrats make a very strong case against the president in his Senate trial. A handful of Republicans vote their conscience, break with party ranks, and vote to convict the former president. And then several of them are immediately punished for doing so back home?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: That's correct, yes. With censure resolutions as the primary tool of punishment, but that could soon evolve into primary challenges, broader denunciations. For people who are retiring, it could end up having people run against them in the primary, even though they're leaving, by which I mean like say, I'm not going to be like that guy, that Pat Toomey or Richard Burr, that anti-Trump sellout, fake news, whatever, and as a result permanently tarnish their reputation in the state Republican Party and turn them into a pariah.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: There are all sorts of ways this could play out that end up making them look or feel awful. And again, three already have been formally censured. What's going on back home for these Republicans?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: There's this famous quote about American politics that says, all politics are local, which is supposed to say that primarily people care about what is going on in their localities and everything from politics flows outwards of people's immediate circumstances. But increasingly at the state level, all politics are becoming national.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: You have this thing where Republican parties at the state level are not only following with the kind of Trumpy nuttiness that you see from the national party, but actively leading it, like going more and further and harder in that direction. And even before then, you had a lot of state Republican parties being the tip of the spear when it comes to Republican efforts to make elections less fair and make it more and more difficult for Democrats to be elected even when they win a majority of voters.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Basically, the Republican Party is radicalizing at the local level and not just at the national level. And that is leading to consequences for national politicians who think that they are safer or in less trouble because of their local support. When in actuality, what they're finding is that what happens at the local level is determined and shaped by what happens at the national level.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Well, we've been focused on this show probably a lot more on the radicalization on the national level. What's going on at the state level? Choosing to side with the far right fringe or not, that's the battle at the state party level.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: The Oregon State Republican Party passed a resolution calling the Capitol insurrection a false flag operation that was designed to pave the way for a leftist dictatorship somehow. It actually compares the Capitol storming to the 1933 Reichstag fire that the Nazis used to take over Germany.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: You had a tweet from the Hawaii Republican Party that was basically endorsing QAnon. Shirlene Ostrov resigned to allow the party to recover from the controversy. The party says the tweet from a Hawaii GOP official was unauthorized. It was later deleted. But the point is more that someone that high in the party was drawn to that level of ideological nuttiness.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: The Arizona Republican Party censured current Republican sitting governor, Doug Ducey, for his coronavirus restrictions. And they also passed censures of former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. And why were they censured? Because they voted for Joe Biden and supported Biden and said that Trump was maybe crazy.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: McCain tweeting her response, time for some soul searching in the Arizona GOP. Flake texting, if condoning the president's behavior is required to stay in the party's good graces, I'm just fine being on the outs.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Pennsylvania state Republicans are limiting courts' abilities to cure election challenges. And you've seen censure stuff in lots of different state Republican parties about the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump. The Oregon Republican Party defiantly defends Trump. Patriots are not going away. The president's not going away.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: The state party passed a resolution condemning 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, calling it a betrayal. On the whole, an escalating amount of nuttiness from these different Republican state parties. And then, of course, one example we did talk about on the show was a number of states signing on to challenge the election results at the Supreme Court.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Yeah, correct. That was led by the Texas state attorney general. Supreme Court threw it out in a very, very terse letter that basically amounted to saying in polite Supreme Court ease, like, this is complete nonsense and we're not going to hear it or listen to it or pay attention to it.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: How do we explain this phenomenon, Zach? Is this just the former president was very compelling at a local level and he has this, I don't know, tens of millions strong base of support that will follow him into the dark? Or is there something else going on here too?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Look I think there has been a long and concerted effort by the Republican Party to use the states as mechanisms for exercising wielding and controlling power on a permanent basis. So for instance, in 2010, there was something called Project Red Map, which was a national Republican-coordinated campaign to do as much gerrymandering as possible in the wake of the 2010 census and the party's victory in the 2010 elections that led to the takeover of a number of state houses.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And so what you saw at these state levels in terms of redrawing the maps to ensure the Republicans would have durable majorities in the national house and in local state houses, that was done very deliberately with input from national parties with the effort of creating state-based institutions that become a really important part of the national party's ability to rig the system in their favor.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And that speaks to the role that state parties play in American politics right now. They're not these hyper-local institutions anymore. There's a bunch of research from political scientists that shows that increasingly, if you look at state party platforms, they are more and more focused on national topics and less and less focused on local ones.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And they start to sound more and more like each other. And I think a lot of this has to do with both the extremism and the national focus of media nowadays. Like you used to have a lot of fragmented media markets where local politicians and the voters they answered to were really concerned about hyper-local issues.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: But now, with the decline in local newspapers, for example, and the increasing prevalence of online news outlets that have a national focus and also are highly ideological, and not just online, right? Also, the rise of Fox News and its competitors like Newsmax and One America News, you end up getting this environment where what voters care about, what the people who engage in politics are really concerned with, are the same things that everyone everywhere is really concerned about.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And just practically speaking, what does that mean for the future not only of the GOP, but for the future of congressional politics, for the future of American politics? I mean, on one hand, you have this clear cut case that the Democratic impeachment managers made that it sounds like people on both sides of the aisle found very compelling.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: You have this historic impeachment vote where more GOP members broke ranks to join Democrats, to say the president crossed a line here. He helped incite this mob. And yet you have this other phenomena here where people who voted for what they deemed right and true are now being punished and may, who knows, lose their seats because of it.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: There's a wild quote from a Pennsylvania Republican official talking about why he's so angry at Pat Toomey. We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. Which is pretty striking, right? Like, that in and of itself is pretty horrifying.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: But then he goes on to say something else. We sent him there to represent us. What that means, if you unpack it a little bit, is that they view the job of an elected representative to be not voting for what they believe is right, not exercising their own judgment, but reflecting the will specifically of the people who supported him, not everybody in the state.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: The people who voted for him, that narrow slice of the population that is Republican and willing to vote Republican in Senate elections. So if that's your theory of representativeness, you're basically telling members of Congress and the government to outsource their judgment to a base that's become more and more extreme and has been made more and more extreme by national politicians, either for very Trumpy reasons, which are a combination of actually believing these things and political cruelty, or for the sort of more cynical reasons that making people more extreme helps get them out to vote for you.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: and thus has proven itself to be politically useful. Whichever way you want to run it, the National Party has helped create this monster that is now eating them and preventing them from doing things that they want to do, like getting Trump out of their party to try to restore a political system that they feel like they really can control.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: It's just sort of a classic Frankenstein's monster type situation where the party that people like Mitch McConnell has created is turning on them. And it's turning on American democracy too, which they partly intended, but they didn't intend it to be so crass and so obvious and so violent. And now we all have to live with the consequences of what they've done.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And it's not even clear, based on this vote and people like McConnell's reaction, that there's going to be a serious effort to clean it up. In fact, I bet against it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Increase your wealth, customize and save, we say. That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
