You Can Sum Up The Impeachment Trial In Two Words: Lamar Alexander

So it's now official.  The actual vote on the impeachment articles themselves won't take place until next Wednesday, but the outcome is, as it probably always was, a foregone conclusion.  D***** T**** will not become the first President in American history to be removed from office after being impeached.  He and his supporters will spin this outcome as a total exoneration, but it won't be.  It can't be.  Because it will be the first impeachment trial in American history without testimonial or documentary evidence. 

This, thanks to 51 Republican members of the U.S. Senate who voted in favor of that outcome, thereby turning a solemn moment in our constitutional experiment into a total farce, and almost certainly violating their oaths as Senators to support the Constitution, as well as their separate oaths as impeachment jurors to render impartial justice.  How in the name of justice itself can you render an impartial verdict without a direct examination of the evidence proffered to either support or deny that verdict?

In fact, answering that question is relatively easy:  the 51 Senators who voted against receiving evidence knew that it would prove beyond any doubt, much less a reasonable one, that T**** was guilty of the offenses filed by the House of Representatives against him.  Likewise, they knew his supporters simply didn't care what the evidence did or did not show.  They love T**** for the simple reason that T**** hates liberals, and liberals are their enemy.  Deep down inside, they know that their own lives are miserable because of literally decades of making bad political choices, but they would rather die than admit the simple truth:  they are the authors of their own misery.  There's a simple reason that blue states flourish and red states wither:  liberal ideas work.

And so-called "moderate" Republicans--the few that are left, anyway--know that to be true, which is why they are willing to work with Democrats in the first place.  Which brings me to the curious case of Lamar Alexander, senior Senator from Tennessee, and his role in today's historical embarrassment.

A man with a long and distinguished career in government--Tennessee governor, university president and Secretary of Education, in addition to his Senate career--many people hoped that Alexander might be one of a handful of Republicans who would cast a potentially decisive vote in favor of the admission of evidence.  After all, he is 79 and had already announced his retirement from his seat, to take place at the end of this year.  What had he to lose by siding with Democrats, as well as the verdict of history against T****?

Well, as it turns out, plenty.

For one thing, regardless of T****'s short-term popularity, nearly every Republican politician knows that the end is near, that the poor-white-trash racism that has propelled the party for decades is losing ground in American politics and driving it to destruction.  No Republican will admit this publicly, but nearly all of them will readily concede it privately.  You can read more about that here.  It's fair to say, in fact, that this reality is doubtlessly one of the reasons Alexander is leaving his Senate seat at this point.

But again, if his career is over, why not do the right thing and damn the consequences?

Because he can now go from Capitol Hill to K Street , and make that lobbyist fortune he's been pining to make for years.  And he can't do that if he does anything to ignore the reality that the Republican Party is now T****'s party.  Or the fact that what's left of Main Street Republicans love T****'s tax cuts and deregulation far too much.

Is this a bizarre accusation to make against a 79-year old man, who may not have an especially lengthy lobbying career ahead of him?  Not especially.  Alexander's in reasonably good health, so far as anyone knows, and lobbying is not a physically stressful career.  He's got a Rolodex he's built up over many decades, and he's not going to pass up the chance to cash in on it in a big way.  Frankly, Alexander is the poster child for justifying a law banning members of Congress from any form of lobbying work for at least a decade after leaving office.

That, however, is a discussion for another day.  But, on this day, when constitutional government and perhaps democracy itself have been sold down the river, it's why today's events in the Senate can best be summed up simply with the name of the "gentleman" from the Volunteer State.