WASHINGTON — The four senators from Kansas and Missouri voted as expected Saturday to acquit former President Donald Trump of the charge of incitement of insurrection.
The Senate failed to reach the required two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump after only seven Republicans joined the chamber’s 50 Democrats. It was the most senators who ever voted to convict a president of their own party, but 10 short of the amount needed.
Trump’s trial came roughly a year after his acquittal from his first impeachment — also supported by the region’s senators — and five weeks after a mob of Trump loyalists ransacked the Capitol in a riot that left five people dead.
Saturday’s vote culminated a week in which House impeachment managers showed dramatic new security video that revealed how close Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney had come to being attacked by the mob. They pointed to video of a rioter with a bullhorn reading one of Trump’s tweets about former Vice President Mike Pence as the mob laid siege to the Capitol.
And they played footage of speech after speech in which Trump framed Congress’ Jan. 6 session as the moment for his supporters to fight.
None of it mattered.
The acquittal was foreshadowed two weeks earlier when a majority of Republicans voted to table the trial. On Tuesday, the trial’s first day, all four from the Kansas City area voted that the proceeding was unconstitutional because Trump has left office.
“I don’t think it’s constitutional. I don’t think we should be doing it,” Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told reporters on his way into the Senate chamber Tuesday.
He said later in the week that nothing had been presented that would make someone change their view on that point.
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The argument that Trump cannot be tried after leaving office has consistently been rebutted by constitutional scholars. The Senate has previously held impeachment trials for federal judges after they’ve left office.
But it’s a position that allows GOP senators to avoid taking a stance on whether Trump’s behavior was impeachable. Blunt dodged the question at the end of the trial’s first day.
“We went for 200 years impeaching one President... Now we’ve had three presidential impeachments in 25 years. You do wonder if any of these impeachments serve the right purpose,” said Blunt, who voted to impeach then-President Bill Clinton as a member of the House in 1998.
Blunt and Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran, who also voted for Clinton’s impeachment, are both up for re-election in 2022 and would be vulnerable to primary challenges from Trump-backed candidates if they voted to convict.
Several Republican House members who voted to impeach have faced censure from their state parties, a sign of the hold the former president retains over the GOP.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Missouri’s senior Democrat, said earlier in the week that acquittal votes by the region’s senators would haunt them long after the next election cycle and permanently damage their reputations.
“Fifty years from now, 100 years from now, the Jan. 6 attempted coup d’etat is going to be one of the big chapters in American history books and we all have to make sure that our little part in responding to that insurrection is something unborn generations of our lineage can be proud of,” Cleaver told The Star.
Moran said in a statement after the vote that Trump “was wrong to continue to spread allegations of widespread fraud and not immediately discourage the reprehensible and unpatriotic behavior,” but he defended his vote to acquit the former president.
“Because former President Trump is no longer in office, I voted to acquit. Establishing the precedent that the Senate has jurisdiction to convict a former president would cause extreme damage to our country and the future of the presidency.”
Trump’s attorneys argued that the former president’s exhortations to fight were not a call to violence but rather a plea for his supporters to back primary challenges against GOP lawmakers who voted against overturning the election.
Blunt, one of the GOP lawmakers who could face such a primary challenge, agreed with this analysis of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech.
“You heard what he said on Jan. 6, which was not, ‘Go down and fight.’ It was that we were supposed to fight and then they’d fight us in the primary if it didn’t work out that way,” Blunt said Friday.
The Senate voted 55 to 45 call witnesses Saturday morning, which would have extended the trial for weeks.
But shortly after that vote, the House impeachment managers and Trump’s legal team instead reached a deal to avoid calling witnesses. They instead submitted a statement from Washington Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler describing a phone call in which House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy begged Trump to call off the mob and the then-president refused.
After Democrats walked back their push for witnesses, former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, a political analyst for MSNBC, said witnesses were unlikely to change the outcome of the trial.
“And as much as we hate it, witnesses were not going to change votes. Be mad at the people that won’t convict, not those that are trying to convict,” she said on Twitter.
Two of the region’s senators , Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, used the trial as a campaign fundraising opportunity. Both voted last month to overturn the election results just hours after the riot and both sent fundraising pleas tied to the trial.
“I’m incensed. The first impeachment was a sham, and so is this one. It’s completely unconstitutional and the Democrats know it. They’re still obsessed with President Trump, so they’re putting their political whims before the American people,” Marshall said in a fundraising email during the trial’s first day.
“Just like I opposed the last impeachment, I’m opposing this one. That means Democrats and their allies in the liberal media will attack me with all they’ve got,” said Marshall, who had voted against the previous impeachment as a member of the House.
Marshall posted a video to Twitter Thursday in which he accused the House of rushing through the impeachment process. He then wrongly asserted that the House had withheld delivery of the impeachment articles until after Trump left office.
“Why did they wait until after the inauguration to bring those impeachment articles over? If they really wanted to try Donald Trump, they should have brought them over earlier,” Marshall said in the video.
In fact, the decision to wait for the trial until after President Joe Biden’s inauguration was made by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, who announced it minutes after the House’s Jan. 13 impeachment vote.
McConnell, who was Senate majority leader until Vice President Kamala Harris’ swearing-in on Jan. 20, said at the time that Congress should be “completely focused on facilitating a safe inauguration and an orderly transfer of power.”
Hawley’s behavior was closely scrutinized by the media throughout the trial.
The Missouri Republican was the first senator to announce plans to challenge Biden’s electoral victory, a move many say contributed to the atmosphere that led to the riot.
“Senators are the jurors in the former president’s trial, but how can you be a juror if you were an accomplice to the crime?” Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, one of Hawley’s fiercest critics, said on Twitter. “Looking at you, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.”
Hawley spent much of the trial watching from the visitor’s gallery rather than the Senate floor.
He said the seating gave him a better view and allowed him to spread out with his trial notes. But when he reportedly put up his feet during Wednesday’s proceedings he faced accusations that he wasn’t paying attention.
There was little doubt that Hawley, the only senator to oppose all of Biden’s cabinet nominees, would vote to acquit Trump based on his public statements and previous actions.
“I think what we’re watching is a total kangaroo court. It is an illegitimate proceeding. It is unconstitutional,” Hawley said on Fox News on Thursday.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, an Overland Park native, said the Jan. 6 violence was a direct result of the Senate’s vote to acquit Trump a year ago at his first trial. He pointed to the violence against police officers and bemoaned the Senate’s failure to hold Trump accountable.
“So many risked all to protect us. The least we can do is protect them by voting to condemn and thus prevent behavior that should never be repeated,” Kaine said.
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