Impeachment trial: Susan Collins’s unhealthy rationale for acquitting Trump

The rationale Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gave for voting for acquit President Donald Trump aged poorly earlier than she even had an opportunity to formally solid it.

Following a speech on the Senate ground on Tuesday by which she announced she’ll vote to acquit, Collins instructed Norah O’Donnell of CBS that she believes Trump “has realized from this case” and “might be far more cautious sooner or later.”

Getting impeached “is a fairly large lesson,” Collins stated — the implication being that Trump might be chastened going ahead from making an attempt to pervert diplomacy into an opposition analysis alternative, as he did with the Ukrainian authorities.

Collins’s hopefulness about Trump altering his habits is absurd on his face. Trump has spent 5 months insisting that a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that’s on the coronary heart of his impeachment — one by which Trump implicitly linked army assist to Ukraine with the nation serving to him with investigations of his political rivals — is “good.”

It’s properly established that Trump isn’t large on apologies or regret. Simply take a look at the circumstances surrounding the Zelensky name. It occurred on July 25 — in the future after particular counsel Robert Mueller wound down his investigation of Trump by testifying to Congress and saying Trump could be indicted after his time period for obstructing justice due to his interference with the Russia investigation.

However as an alternative of responding to the top of the Russia investigation by cooling his jets, Trump was on the telephone with the Ukrainian president the very subsequent day making an attempt to solicit political favors — the exact same conduct that fueled suspicions about his Russia dealings in the first place.

So Collins’s rationale was exhausting to purchase to start with. And as if on cue, Trump instructed reporters throughout an off-the-record lunch on Tuesday that, certainly, he doesn’t really feel he has any classes to be taught from getting impeached.

Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker have the small print for the Washington Post:

The president lined a variety of subjects on the luncheon.

When he was requested about Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) saying he had realized a lesson throughout impeachment, the president stated he’d carried out nothing fallacious: “It was an ideal name.”

Whereas Collins claims to have principled causes for voting to acquit Trump — she instructed O’Donnell that “I don’t imagine that the habits alleged reaches the excessive bar within the Structure for overturning an election and eradicating a duly-elected president” — it’s additionally the case that she’s running for reelection and facing perhaps her toughest race yet, and in that place she will be able to’t afford to cross the undisputed chief of her occasion.

However Collins’s want to win one other time period doesn’t completely clarify why she’s pushing such an implausible speaking level. On Meet the Press final Sunday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who’s retiring subsequent January, deployed the identical rationale to justify his vote for Trump’s acquittal.

“if a name like that will get you an impeachment, I might suppose he’d suppose twice earlier than doing it once more,” Alexander stated, and he even caught by that declare after Chuck Todd pressed him to elucidate “what instance within the lifetime of Donald Trump has he been chastened.”

“I haven’t studied his life that shut,” Alexander replied, after a pause.

Certainly, few if any examples of Trump being chastened could possibly be cited, and the timeline of the Ukraine scandal signifies it’s folly for Republicans to imagine he received’t attempt to cheat once more. However partisanship is a hell of a drug.

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