Two weeks before the House impeachment vote, everyone said the
moderates would vote against; within a week that trend turned and by the
voting hour was a torrent for impeaching. One would-be Speaker's head
rolled. The fact that the GOP voted against the grain of the opinion polls
must rank as the most shocking phenomenon of them all. After that alone,
anything is possible, and anything, like so much else that was unthinkable in
1998, may include the Senate slowly finding its way to 67 votes.
There is no comparison between the House vote and the Senate trial. First, there is no equivalent of Tom DeLay in the Senate, and even if there is, strong-arm tactics wouldn't work, and even if it can work, it has to work on Democratic Senators, and not on Republican wimps like those in the House, some of whom later came out, asking for censure in the Senate.
Second, it requires a 2/3 vote in the Senate to convict and that would require at least 12 Democrats to defect, assuming that the Republicans can keep all their 55 votes intact (which is not a "given" in itself).
Therefore, the hope that the Senate will "slowly find its way to 67 votes" is mere wishful thinking. The "slowly" part implies that the Republicans intend to drag this on for another year if necessary. And if that happens, they would have shot themselves in both the feet as well as in the a** :-) |
