No one is fooled but many are in denial

“Don’t confuse me with the facts.  My mind already is made up.”  Chairman George D. Aiken, of the Senate Agriculture Committee, 1954

In Federalist paper #65, Alexander Hamilton extolled the virtues of the U.S. Senate as the premier entity to address impeachment hearings over other institutions, including the Supreme Court.

“Where else, than in the Senate … would [that body] be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve unawed and uninfluenced the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers?”, Hamilton asserted back in 1788.

That appreciable estimation of the U.S. Senate by Hamilton has pretty much stood the test of time over most of the last two centuries.  But over the last two decades Republicans, more so than their Democratic counterparts, have allowed the so-called greatest deliberative body in the world to devolve into a chamber of ideologues bent solely on retaining political power. 

“The Republican Party laid the groundwork for dysfunction long before Donald Trump was elected president”, noted political historians E. J. Dionne, Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann in their September, 2017 Atlantic Magazine article: How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms.  

“We don’t fully appreciate the power of norms until they are violated on a regular
 basis. And the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: As one person breaks with tradition and expectation, behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Donald Trump is the Normless President, and his ascendancy threatens to inspire a new wave of norm-breaking.”  according to Dionne, Ornstein and Mann

The evidence of this dysfunction is on display in the Senate trial of Donald John Trump.  The compelling fact-based evidence that the Democratic managers have laid out for the world to see compels honest and objective brokers to seriously consider removing a president who repeatedly displays childish rants at anyone who exposes his incompetence to be the leader of the free world.

Because they have been unable to argue the case laid out by the Democrats, Trump’s White House lawyers have engaged in Trump’s traditional style of attacking your accusers to distract those who would judge the president’s abuse of power.  And though  these Senators are no fools, will they act as if they are when they deny the obvious motives of a President who waged a months long campaign to pressure the Ukrainians to investigate a bogus conspiracy about the Bidens and the Ukrainian efforts, not Russian, to influence our 2016 elections?

“The principal restraint on the Congress is not personal corruption or vulnerability to executive intimidation but political timidity.” - Richard N. Goodwin

Will they ignore the fact that any effort to investigate real corruption by any American citizens in foreign affairs should have gone through our Justice Department using the state of the art tools and highly skilled professionals of the FBI, not some shady back channel source headed by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani?

Will they ignore the fact that Trump, after whining about the lack of due process during the House impeachment hearings, refuses now to provide his own witnesses and documents in the Senate trial that he claims would exonerate him of any wrong doing?

Will they ignore the very high probability that the military & security funds being withheld to get Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce (not actually initiate) and investigation into the Bidens and Crowdstrike were only released after the White House became aware of a whistle blower’s complaint that the Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act as stated in a recent GAO report? 

If these Republican Senators, including Texas’ own Cruz and Cornyn, deny the compelling evidence of Trump’s wrong doing in Ukraine, history will mark them as being complicit in this action that will seriously damage our fragile democracy.  Furthermore, it may well validate Trump's infamous 2016 campaign boast that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and wouldn't lose any voters.