Today, Explained - Acquitted

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

The Senate has acquitted President Trump. Vox’s Ezra Klein argues it’s time to change the Constitution. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Ukraine. Ukraine Explained. It's Ukraine Explained. It's Wednesday, February 5th. That's about six months since the phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that sparked a whistleblower complaint, five months since the House opened an impeachment inquiry and nearly two weeks since the Senate started its trial. And today, we got a verdict. The presiding officer directs judgment to be entered in accordance with the judgment of the Senate as follows. The Senate, having tried Donald John Trump, President of the United States, upon two articles of impeachment

exhibited against him by the House of Representatives, and two-thirds of the senators present not having found him guilty of the charges contained therein, it is therefore ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby acquitted of the charges in said articles. The president was impeached, then acquitted, and not convicted. Andrew Prokop has been covering this from the jump for Vox, and he saw this acquittal coming from the jump, too. In the end, things came down to the fact that about 90% of Republican voters still opposed removing him from office. And Republican senators were just never going to do that if their primary voters felt that way.

And do you think that's what this was? This was Republican senators reacting to how their constituents at home felt about impeachment broadly? It's a mix of things. Some might just believe in defending Trump on the merits here. Some might argue that, well, this issue of Ukraine and Biden, it's not really that important. He does a bunch of other good things. We should keep him in office. But what the opinion among the Republican base does is it puts a lot of pressure and it makes it very difficult for any senator who might be flirting with voting to convict Trump, who's a Republican.

It makes clear that their future political careers would be very difficult if they were to do that. So it incentivizes them to search around for a justification to vote to acquit him and a vote that it is widely believed within the GOP would help their party as well as protecting Trump. One of the bigger questions throughout the trial was, of course, whether or not Republicans would call on witnesses, and they ultimately decided not to. Was there a moment where they might have? So when last we spoke, John Bolton had just released his statement saying he would be happy to testify in the Senate. And the New York Times had subsequently reported on what Bolton had written in his forthcoming book, revealing that Trump did indeed tell him to pressure the Ukrainians to give information about the Bidens.

So that seemed to put the pressure on Republican senators to call Bolton as a witness. He clearly had a story to tell. It was relevant information. But what they ended up coming around to after a couple of days of nervousness, McConnell and other Republican senators made the case that this is really a road we do not want to go down. They said that it would just prolong the trial. They would have to, for fairness, let Trump call some witnesses. He would want to call Hunter Biden or Joe Biden. It would make this all into a big mess. I didn't find any of that too convincing because really it was up to the Republican majority to call whoever they want as witnesses.

They don't have to do what Trump said. But I think the argument that ended up finally winning the day, at least if you listen to the key vote, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was basically whose mind is going to change from Bolton's testimony or any witness's testimony. There was no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The House managers had proved this with what they called a, quote, mountain of overwhelming evidence. One of the managers said it was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. But he said that in his view, this just doesn't rise to the picture of whether Trump should be removed for this, even if it is true, I think he shouldn't. That's Lamar Alexander. But isn't there an argument here that having Bolton come in and say, you know, I directly witnessed the president offering a quid pro quo might change the minds of others who are still

maintaining this argument that there was no direct quid pro quo? I think generally the people making the argument that there is no direct quid pro quo do not exactly have open minds here. They're sticking to the president's line here. He insists it was a perfect phone call and he did nothing wrong. I think the Republican senators who actually did at least claim to have open minds on the evidence, they had to admit in the end that the House's evidence was strong. So if they were searching for a reason to acquit, then the argument that this isn't an impeachable offense, this doesn't rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, and removing an elected president from office is so severe a

remedy that we should be very careful about using it and we should be cautious in this case. That's the tailor-made justification for the people who had open minds on this. So instead of witnesses, we got closing arguments this week. Did anyone say anything notable? It was basically a summary, again, of the case so far and further urging on the part of Adam Schiff. Every single vote, even a single vote by a single member can change the course of history. It is said that a single man or woman of courage makes a majority.

Is there one among you who will say enough? Which really shows how much the bar has been lowered. There, he was just looking for one Republican senator who would vote to convict Trump to prevent it from being a total shutout for the impeachment managers among the GOP majority. And he got one. He got Mitt Romney on abuse of power, and he didn't get Mitt Romney on obstruction of Congress somehow. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging

the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong. It's a pretty big deal. It is just one vote in the end. It's not going to really change very much. But Trump very much wanted 100 percent perfect Republican support, and Romney deprived him of that. With my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me. I will only be one name among many, no more, no less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.

Senator Willard Mitt Romney became today the only senator to ever vote against his own party in an impeachment trial. Is it going to be a tough road ahead for Mitt? Well, sure. Romney is representing a very red state, Utah. That's not a state that necessarily loves Trump that much, but there's been a lot of pressure on Republicans to come home to Trump and back him and back the team. But Romney, he has his own independent political brand. He's not up for reelection until 2024. And he's so he would be putting his reelection if he chooses to pursue it at some risk by doing this. So, yeah, it's always does show some bravery to go against the grain and do what is sure to invite the wrath and fury of the president. What does it say that Democrats could only convince one Republican here? I think it shows the power of partisanship and polarization in the modern Congress and the immense pressure on these Republicans to find a way to embrace the party line,

whatever it may be, whether it's arguing that Trump did nothing wrong and that it was really the Bidens who were guilty, or whether it's arguing that, yes, he did do something wrong, but impeachment is too severe a remedy, or whether it's arguing that, yes, he did do something wrong, but he learned his lesson and he'll be better now. If these senators want to have continued careers in the Republican Party, they have very strong incentives to try to figure out a way to justify acquitting Trump. Because if they voted to convict Trump, it would make them basically public enemy number one on the right. They'd be Judas, a traitor, and Trump's diehard fans would stop at nothing before trying to force them out in some future primary or election.

I mean, the Democrats throughout this process made the argument that a trial without witnesses isn't a trial. And now that this trial is over, I mean, it was meant to be a historic thing, but ultimately, was it a trial or was it just a big sham? I think we got some interesting points. There were questioning from the senators for both sides that had its interesting moments, but no, it wasn't a real trial. We didn't get into witnesses. We didn't explore any new evidence. It was a recap of the case that the House had put together last year and a political decision about what to do with that information. And now that the president's been acquitted, are his troubles over? Is the Ukraine scandal behind him forever?

Well, I'm old enough to remember when Mueller wrapped up and Trump's troubles were over. And then he, of course, did not learn his lesson back then and immediately told Ukraine's president to investigate the Bidens and started this whole thing. So who knows what will happen next? Okay, so this impeachment trial didn't work as intended. There weren't witnesses. People clearly didn't want to know the truth and the whole truth. After a quick break, I'll talk to acclaimed podcaster and author Ezra Klein about how this impeachment mechanism could work a little better. Thank you. time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. I spoke to Vox's editor-at-large, Ezra Klein, last week about polarization. He explained how impeachment doesn't really work in a polarized system. You can't reach that supermajority to convict if everyone's voting

on party lines. And the founders did not see that coming. The founders wrongly thought the American political system's separate branches would resist parties and partisanship polarization. So now that we have this super partisan impeachment vote, I asked Ezra how the founders might revise the system they created. So you can imagine something like if the House votes for impeachment, which already you're dealing with party politics there, then instead of going to another body of elected politicians, who then you need a super majority of them, it goes to the Supreme Court or it goes to some form of tribunal that is composed in a predetermined way. And then the other thing that I think is kind of interesting is impeachment works in an odd way where you get impeached, right, which is to say the charges are going to get brought to the Senate.

And then you need a two-thirds majority for removal. We actually don't have much that is in between that. I think it would be interesting to imagine having a more direct censure process or you can imagine impeachment process is more about just simply saying, stating, having like a gold seal on did the person actually do this thing? And then the question of how they are punished, whether or not it is removal or censure or something else, is separated from that a little bit. The terms conviction and acquittal are connected to the question of removal. It is very possible, I think, that there might be more openness to something like conviction if the outcome is not as severe as removal. And maybe what you want to do is accept that at least when parties are going to be involved, it's going to be very hard for them to remove a president. But it might be important for a message to be able to be sent to a president.

Does that run the risk of politicizing the Supreme Court even more than it already is? I mean people didn't seem to love it when they called the 2000 election and decided who the president would be. I think that is 100 percent the risk. I think that the problem is that there's no version of this that doesn't include politicization, right? But you can't take politics out of politics. And so the question is who can withstand it? And you think the Supreme Court better than the Senate? I'm not necessarily arguing for the Supreme Court.

I can imagine it's something where the Supreme Court even names judges, right? Creates something new. I can imagine a lot of ways to do it. And this would just be like me doing fantasy constitutional redesign. You'd want something better than me doing fantasy constitutional redesign. But the idea that we should do some constitutional redesign should not be considered as radical as I think many people hear it. The idea that some parts of our constitution are not working given the construction of our current political system. And in order to continue honoring the founders' intent, we have to update their construction is I think an obvious

point that the people should take more seriously. That's why we have 27 amendments. But in all seriousness, I don't think this impeachment process has been super hope inducing for a lot of people. And you're talking about changing the system entirely. Is that going to be as hard as a conviction in a Senate impeachment trial? Do you have any hope something that ambitious could happen? It is not that I have hope that we are about to fix all of our problems. I quite really don't. It is that I have a realism about how bad things have been at almost every other time in American political history. There are not many moments in America that you would prefer to be in than this one, as bad as this one is.

In the past, we've been much less of a democracy. In the past, we've had much more authoritarian rule. In the past, we've had much more political violence. In the past, we've had much more rampant racial and gender and sexual and so on discrimination. And so something that I think is easy for us to do is mix up levels and trends. The level of American politics right now, as bad as it is, is much better than at almost any time in our history. The trend is quite bad. And so there are many times when on trend, you might prefer where we were because we were clearly

making progress, even if it was from a low place. Right now, we've made a lot of progress and we seem to be squandering some of it. And so the particular form of hope I have is that it would not take too much for us to continue doing better than we've done at any other point in American history. It's always been frustrating. The American political system has never worked, quote unquote, well, never worked easily. Even the moments of great triumph, like the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act comes after many previous efforts at it had failed, after anti-lynching laws had been filibustered

or bottled up in the House Rules Committee. And so we don't have some irenic golden age to go back to. We only have a little bit better of a future to fight for. And I think understood correctly, if we can make things a little bit better than they are now, they'll be a lot better than they ever have been before. There is some hope in that, to recognize that we've been gifted a fairly high space to start from. But it's not to say you shouldn't be concerned. I think you should be concerned. I'm not that hopeful right now. I think that what we're seeing is dangerous and we're

seeing very deep vulnerabilities in the system that I don't think are existential yet in the way they're being exploited, but I think could become so in the future. As much as our level is better than it has been in the past, it is going to take work to get our trend back into a good place. That's vaguely hopeful. I'll take it. Vaguely hopeful. Okay. Vaguely hopeful 2020.