Trump Impeachment Trial: Live Updates Ahead of the Final Votes

The Senate is poised on Wednesday to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, casting a pair of historic votes to render a verdict in an impeachment trial that has further cleaved the two political parties and provided a bitter backdrop for the 2020 presidential campaign.

The afternoon votes are expected to fall almost entirely along party lines, but all eyes are on a few moderate senators on both sides of the aisle who have left the door open to defecting. Even if they did, with the Senate’s 53 Republicans almost uniformly in opposition, Democrats pressing to remove Mr. Trump are all but certain to fall short of the two-thirds majority required under the Constitution — 67 senators — to convict a president and deliver the ultimate remedy of taking him out of office.

There are two articles of impeachment. The first accuses President Trump of abuse of power, alleging that he used his office to pressuring Ukraine to interfere on his behalf in the 2020 election. House investigators concluded he withheld $391 million in military aid and an official visit to the White House for the country’s president as leverage to push Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals, including former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump is also accused of obstruction of Congress for directing federal agencies and officials not to comply with the lawmakers’ inquiry or subpoenas.

The Senate is set to vote on the articles beginning at 4 p.m. Eastern.

Ahead of the votes, senators will appear on the Senate floor and explain their decisions to convict or acquit Mr. Trump.

How to follow it: The New York Times’s congressional and White House teams will be following all of the developments of the day. Visit nytimes.com for a live stream and vote tracker of the proceedings.

Normally a staid body, the Senate for the past two weeks has been roiled day after day by the impeachment trial, leaving several senators dejected and dug into their partisan corners.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in a speech on the Senate floor that the chamber “should be ashamed by the rank partisanship that has been on display here,” adding later: “It’s my hope we’ve finally found bottom here.” She said she planned to acquit Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s likely acquittal has also left Democrats embittered about the future of the institution in which they serve. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said that while he wasn’t surprised by Mr. Trump’s abuse of power, he was surprised by the Senate’s “capitulation” to the president.

“Unchallenged evil spreads like a virus,” Mr. Kaine said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “We have allowed a toxic President to infect the Senate and warp its behavior.”

So where does that leave the Senate? Other senators sounded a more optimistic note.

“I think we heal in part by surprising the people and coming out from our partisan corners and getting stuff done,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said, citing addressing the opioid crisis and crumbling infrastructure as examples. “Stuff that they care about that affects the families we were sent here to represent.”

Delivering an address from the rostrum of the House of Representatives that frequently sounded like a campaign stump speech, Mr. Trump nonetheless steered clear during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night of mentioning his impeachment trial.

That was a departure from last year, when Mr. Trump upbraided the House for what he called “ridiculous partisan investigations” and declared: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”

It is not clear if the restraint will hold on Wednesday, after the Senate’s expected votes to acquit him. Mr. Trump told television anchors at a lunch on Tuesday at the White House that he hoped to give a second set of remarks after the impeachment saga had ended.

All eyes on Wednesday afternoon will be on moderate senators — both Democrats and Republicans — in search of any defections. Mr. Trump would love nothing more than to be able to trumpet a bipartisan acquittal, and he has made it clear that he will not tolerate any Republican defections, hoping for monolithic opposition from his party just as he had when the House voted late last year to impeach him.

A handful of moderate Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, who is facing a steep re-election challenge this year, have left the door open to acquittal but declined to say how they would vote. Mr. Manchin earlier in the week floated the idea of censuring the president, a largely symbolic gesture, but the idea has gained no traction in the polarized Senate.

Republicans are also watching how Senator Mitt Romney of Utah will vote. He has criticized Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and was one of only two Republican senators to vote with Democrats in an unsuccessful bid to consider hearing from additional witnesses and evidence in the trial. (The other was Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who said Tuesday that she would vote to acquit Mr. Trump.)

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