The Senate was right to vote Friday against hearing new witness testimony at President Trump’s impeachment trial. The Democrats’ demand for new witnesses at the trial was a red herring – a talking point that was nonsense.
Bug-eyed Schiff and the other impeachment managers claim that there have been no witnesses in the trial. They said before the Senate voted 51-49 Friday to block more witnesses that if Republicans did note vote to approve subpoenas for former National Security Adviser John Bolton, among other top current and former administration officials, that the trial will be a “sham” – an exercise in “cover-up.” You can’t have a real trial, was their refrain, unless witnesses are called.
It is nonsense. There have been plenty of witnesses. Schiff’s problem is that the additional witnesses he wanted to call would not change what has already been proved in any meaningful way.
The House presentation has featured a mountain of hearsay, press reports read into the record, witnesses testifying about their opinions on subjects they are utterly unqualified to opine on, and so on. None of that would be permitted in a judicial trial.
There have been over a dozen witnesses at the impeachment trial. They have not physically come into the Senate and testified. Rather, they testified in the House investigation. Their testimony is all in the record of the Senate trial, and both the House managers and the president’s counsel relied on it in making their arguments.
That is actually not much of a departure from judicial trials.
The consensus position of many Republican senators is what Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., announced as his conclusion on Thursday night: The Democratic House managers proved their case that the president pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations that might help him politically; but the allegation does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense – because there ultimately were no investigations, because Ukraine got its U.S. aid and was not harmed, because it was lawful for Trump to ask Ukraine to look into the activities of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son for purposes of rooting out corruption, and so on.
Republicans have drawn that conclusion based on hundreds of hours of witness testimony set forth in thousands of pages of transcripts and available for viewing on video recordings. There has been plenty of witness testimony.
If Bolton testified in a manner that is consistent with press reporting about his soon-to-be-published memoir, it would prove that the president pressured Ukraine for investigations.
The House managers have already proved that.
There is no need to belabor the point. The Democrats’ problem is not that they’ve been stopped from proving their case. They did prove their case … but it's nothing anyone is going to get removed over. And even if Bolton testified, that wouldn’t change.
Andrew McCarthy: In Trump impeachment trial, Senate right to block new witness testimony
