Early analysis merely confirms analysts’ priors.
As Steven Taylor noted here yesterday, seven Republican Senators joined all 50 Senate Democrats in voting to convict former President Trump of inciting the riot that killed five people at the Capitol last month. While more than just about anyone predicted going in, that was still ten votes shy of that required by the Constitution for a guilty verdict. So, what does that tell us? Probably not much we didn’t know. A POLITICO Magazine feature in which “Fourteen experts explain what the president’s fast, unusual second impeachment will mean for America” is all over the place, perfectly matching what one would have expected from each of the experts based on their ideological positioning. National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, who cranked out half a dozen books explaining why Barack Obama should have been impeached or how he and Hillary Clinton compared to steal the 2016 election, blamed the Democratic impeachment managers for failing to prove their case. He actually makes some good points, especially that there should have been articles beyond “incitement,” but it strains credulity that it would have mattered if the aim was securing 17 Republican votes to convict. Former George W. Bush speechwriter turned former Republican David Frum offers perhaps the most optimistic take I’ve encountered. In 1955, a junior United States senator named John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, a collection of short essays about eight of his predecessors who had risked their careers for their ideals over the previous 150 years.
