Mitch McConnell, Master of the Blockade, Plots Impeachment Strategy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/us/mitch-mcconnell-impeachment-strategy.html

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WASHINGTON — Shattering convention, he held open a Supreme Court seat for 11 months. He twice changed Senate rules to create a record-setting assembly line of conservative federal judicial confirmations. He has been ruthless in his control of the Senate floor, denying Republicans and Democrats alike much opportunity to debate legislation.

In response, Democrats have called Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, the grim reaper. He embraces the nickname with enthusiasm.

Now, as a showdown intensifies over President Trump’s impeachment trial, the test for Mr. McConnell is whether he can again bulldoze over Democrats while keeping his Republican colleagues together, persuading them to share both his low regard for the impeachment charges and his view of the Senate’s role.

As his successful blockade of Judge Merrick B. Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court showed in 2016, Mr. McConnell is not afraid to defy norms and take intense heat for doing so, as long as he emerges a winner.

“Only one outcome will preserve core precedents rather than smash them into bits in a fit of partisan rage because one party still cannot accept the American people’s choice in 2016,” Mr. McConnell said this week on the Senate floor as he unspooled a 30-minute dissection of what he saw as the flaws in the Democratic-led House impeachment inquiry, his voice dripping with disdain. “The Senate’s duty is clear.”

He did not say precisely what that duty was — or how, in his words, the Senate would “put this right.” But it is very evident that Mr. McConnell’s goal is for the Republican-led Senate to make short work of any trial of Mr. Trump on the two House-passed articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Mr. McConnell wants any proceeding to be bare-bones, with presentations by House prosecutors and defenders of the president followed by a vote to acquit the president of what Mr. McConnell characterizes as partisan accusations that fall far short of the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Democrats, on the other hand, are pressing to hear from potentially central witnesses whom Mr. Trump barred from testifying before the House inquiry about his dealings with Ukraine, including John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff. They also want relevant documents that the Trump administration withheld from the House.

“If the House’s case is so weak,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, taunting Mr. McConnell, “why is Leader McConnell so afraid of witnesses and documents?”

Mr. McConnell’s position has drawn outrage from Democrats, who argue that he is essentially aiding and abetting the president’s misconduct.

“His refusal to permit witnesses and documents really makes him complicit in the Trump cover-up, as it will rightly be seen, and that is going to be one of the main points in his legacy,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.

The issue was left unresolved as Congress exited town on Thursday for the holidays, and Mr. McConnell and Mr. Schumer remain at odds over how to open the Senate trial when and if one occurs.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who labeled Mr. McConnell a “rogue” majority leader because of his openly hostile attitude toward the House impeachment proceedings, has held off on sending the House articles across the Capitol. First, she says, she wants to make certain fair ground rules are set for the Senate proceedings.

Democrats hope the procedural fight keeps the spotlight squarely on Mr. McConnell — who has already declared himself “not an impartial juror” — and makes other Senate Republicans queasy about shutting down witnesses when many Americans would expect such testimony as a standard part of any trial.

The issue could be particularly tricky for some Republicans who will be on the ballot next year, such as Senator Susan Collins of Maine, and who will want to be seen as taking impeachment seriously and not rushing to judgment.

And Ms. Pelosi believes that Mr. Trump is so eager for the public vindication of a Senate acquittal that he will put pressure on the majority leader to make it happen even if it means offering some concessions to Mr. Schumer.

For now, however, Mr. McConnell — and many other Senate Republicans — seem unmoved by the House posture. He spent much of Thursday gleefully ridiculing Democrats’ negotiating tactics.

“Do you think this is leverage, to not send us something we’d rather not do?” he asked reporters this week as he cracked a broad smile outside the Senate chamber, in a departure from his usual dour expression.

For Mr. McConnell, the role of Mr. Trump’s protector in a Senate trial is not necessarily a comfortable one. Though they have worked closely on judges and are linked politically, Mr. McConnell has privately grimaced at some of Mr. Trump’s more incendiary tweets and actions, and he has at times taken issue publicly with the president, particularly on Russia.

The majority leader has made clear that he believes Russia was behind the 2016 election interference and has backed penalizing Moscow. When Mr. Trump insisted that Mr. McConnell told him that his phone call with the president of Ukraine was “innocent,” Mr. McConnell told reporters that he never recalled such a conversation. But he has run the Senate floor with an eye toward minimizing any divisions between Senate Republicans and Mr. Trump.

As majority leader, he has essentially been given sole power by his Republican colleagues to decide what to put on the floor. He has been very stingy in what he has allowed, severely limiting the legislative activity in the Senate to spare Republicans vulnerable in next year’s elections tough votes.

But in the event of a Senate impeachment trial, he has less “ball control,” as Mr. McConnell, an avid sports fan, recently described it in an interview with Fox News. Unless a bipartisan agreement is reached, the conduct of the trial will probably be determined by a series of votes. With a slim 53-seat majority, he can afford to lose very few Republicans, and would much prefer to not lose a single one. A shift of four Republicans willing to entertain witnesses could take matters out of his hands.

That would be irritating to Mr. McConnell, who is himself on the ballot next year and has made clear that he has no interest in any separation from Mr. Trump. He has said he will work in concert with Mr. Trump’s legal team during the impeachment trial, and on Friday, he escorted Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Eric Ueland, the legislative affairs chief, to the Senate floor to discuss how the proceeding would work.

Calling witnesses could inject unpredictability into a Senate trial and lead to the disclosure of new information damaging to the president. Mr. McConnell likes neither unpredictability nor anything that threatens his own political power.

“He only moves if he is personally concerned about his own re-election or the election of his majority,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and a longtime student of Mr. McConnell from across the aisle.

In an interview with PBS, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a chief architect of the impeachment, accused Mr. McConnell of “basically surrendering his institutional role to be a coequal branch of government, and acting like the president’s lieutenant.”

Mr. McConnell said he considered the demand for witnesses from Senate Democrats an acknowledgment that the House did a shoddy job on the impeachment. He said the call for more testimony equated to a demand that the Senate “redo House Democrats’ homework for them.”

To date, the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate seem to share Mr. McConnell’s opinion of what he calls the thinnest and weakest impeachment case in history.

“He is absolutely right,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican. “This is a political, not a legal trial. We know what the outcome is going to be and we are not going to allow Schumer to manipulate the process.”

Mr. McConnell’s hard-line stance on witnesses is already drawing caustic comparisons by Democrats to his handling of the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. The day Mr. Scalia’s death was announced, Mr. McConnell quickly announced that he would not allow President Barack Obama to fill the seat. Judge Garland’s nomination languished and died at the end of that year. In the end, a newly inaugurated President Trump nominated Neil M. Gorsuch, who was confirmed in April 2017.

“The senators who never gave Merrick Garland a vote and who’ve been cranking through the confirmation of unqualified judges can’t find enough smelling salts and fainting couches when Pelosi plays a little hardball on an impeachment trial,” Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, said on Twitter on Thursday.

Mr. McConnell held to his position on the court vacancy under tremendous pressure from Democrats. His Republican colleagues stuck with him and suffered little political damage, a result that might fortify them in the impeachment fight as well, making the outcome of the current stalemate difficult to predict.

“He usually gets pretty much where he wants to go,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a close ally of Mr. McConnell’s. “And he’s got very thick skin.”