This is the Impeachment Briefing, The Times’s newsletter about the impeachment investigation. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.
What happened today
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Senator Mitch McConnell said that he had no intention of negotiating with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the terms of the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, and he urged Ms. Pelosi to transmit the two articles of impeachment that were approved last month. “The House’s turn is over,” Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, said. “The Senate has made its decision.”
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Ms. Pelosi has been withholding the articles in a bid to help Democrats press their case for new witnesses and documents. On Tuesday night she demanded that Mr. McConnell make public his proposed rules for a trial before she delivered the articles, so Democrats could “see the arena in which we will be participating.”
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That approach has been increasingly controversial with members of her party, who seem to be losing patience with the delay. “It’s pretty clear there is not going to be any agreement,” said Senator Doug Jones, whose Alabama seat is especially vulnerable. “So let’s just go ahead.”
The Mitch McConnell we already knew
The transfer of impeachment power to the Senate means that Mr. McConnell is again the power broker of Washington’s central drama. And he is again in position to discard the work of Democrats, who have long seen him as a villain with the cynicism and permanence to wreak havoc in ways that even a president can’t: blocking legislation, Supreme Court nominations and debate on the Senate floor.
Mr. McConnell has made it clear that a fast and slender trial is his idea of the appropriate prelude to an acquittal, an outcome he has predicted, and he has freely acknowledged coordinating his plans with the White House. As my colleague Carl Hulse wrote last month, Mr. McConnell “wants any proceeding to be bare-bones,” so the senator can, as he has said himself, “put this right.”
Why is Mr. McConnell approaching the trial the way he is? To better understand, I talked to Charles Homans, the politics editor of The Times Magazine, who wrote a profile of Mr. McConnell last year.
Charlie, I liked this description in your story of Mr. McConnell as a fact of life. He’s always just there. He’s again found himself at the center of a seismic political-cultural moment. How?
This is the kind of moment he’s specialized in generally, where his party needs a “spear catcher,” as he’s called it: someone to be the public face of a Republican imperative that may or may not be hugely popular with the public.
Mr. McConnell built his reputation in the fight over campaign finance reform, in which he realized he could accrue political capital by being the guy who obstinately defended a broadly unpopular position that Senate Republicans favored. The same went for blocking the Obama administration’s policy agenda. He took a lot of public heat for it, but became the party’s indispensable figure.
He said yesterday that his decision to structure the Senate trial is based on President Bill Clinton’s, on precedent. But he knows that this impeachment looks nothing like Mr. Clinton’s. Why create that pretense?
He has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Senate history, and he’s very clever at finding these precedents from the other side — points of historical comparison that don’t always hold up to much scrutiny, but do allow him to rhetorically present himself as the voice of institutional continuity while achieving his desired political ends.
He loves gamesmanship. What do you think his strategy is with impeachment?
The best analogue to impeachment is probably the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, where Mr. McConnell’s goal was to steer through a publicly fraught process with a minimum of drama and a maximum of control. In this case, he was a voice telling Republicans that yes, an impeachment trial does need to happen, while also structuring it to leave as little to chance as possible when it comes to the outcome. He was a whip before he was a party leader, and remains an inveterate vote counter, and here the Republican votes are not that hard to account for — easier than they were with Kavanaugh.
So what do you think his approach is now with Ms. Pelosi holding onto the impeachment articles?
He’s generally very willing to wait out his opponents, and it looks as if he feels that he can do that here; Ms. Pelosi doesn’t have a lot of leverage. If it’s not going to cost him Senate votes or Senate seats in the fall, he’s not bothered by sitting out there being the public face of this kind of thing.
Mr. McConnell has for his whole career fixated on elections and self-preservation. Next to his official archives in Kentucky, there’s a kind of shrine to elections he has won, from high school to county executive to the Senate. How much do you think November 2020 is in mind for him in his handling of the trial?
From the beginning of the impeachment process, Mr. McConnell has pursued the strategy that does seem to be plausibly the lowest-risk path for Republicans: not shutting down the process but not dragging it out, and putting it behind them in as undramatic a way as possible. There are certainly 2020 Senate candidates for whom voting to acquit Mr. Trump will potentially come with some downside, but at this point it seems unlikely that there are enough of them to actually jeopardize his acquittal.
I don’t think Mr. McConnell sees it as his job here to deliver the unanimous vote that will make Mr. Trump happy or a drawn-out proceeding where people testify about how awesome Mr. Trump is, as the president has reportedly said he wants. He’s there, as usual, to protect his party at all costs.
Read Charles’s profile of Mr. McConnell here.
What else we’re reading
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Politico wrote about how Mr. McConnell was able to secure a unanimous vote from Senate Republicans for the first step of the trial. That involved private conversations with Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two votes that will be crucial to Democrats if they hope to call witnesses.
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Democratic groups will spend millions on impeachment-related advertising in states with vulnerable Republican senators up for re-election this year, CNN reported. Get ready for digital impeachment billboards!
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NBC News reported that Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, is expected to be the lead attorney for Mr. Trump during the trial. Jay Sekulow, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers who helped oversee the president’s negotiations with the Mueller team, will assist him.
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