Trump impeachment: president faces key vote on calling witnesses – live updates

A spokesperson for Mitt Romney has confirmed the Republican senator intends to vote in favor of calling witnesses in the impeachment trial.

Senate Democrats were already counting Romney as a “yes” vote, given his repeated comments about wanting to hear from administration officials like John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser.

However, the votes of Romney and Susan Collins, another Republican senator who has said she is in favor of witnesses, are not enough to get the Democratic proposal passed.

If Romney and Collins are the only Republican senators who support calling witnesses, the final vote will likely be 51-49 against witness testimony. If Lisa Murkowski, another closely watched Republican in this vote, joins Romney and Collins, the final vote could be 50-50.

Some Democratic senators have called on Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts to break the tie if the vote is 50-50, but it seems unlikely Roberts would take such a step. In that case, a tie vote will be a failed vote, and the trial will move toward a rapid end.

The Senate trial will resume at 1 pm ET, and it will kick off with two hours of closing arguments from the impeachment managers and Trump’s legal team.

Senators are then expected to move on to a vote on calling witnesses, which is likely to fail after Republican Lamar Alexander announced last night he would not support the Democratic proposal.

If the witness vote fails, majority leader Mitch McConnell could quickly move on to a final vote on the two articles of impeachment, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

It’s very possible that Trump will be acquitted of those charges tonight, more than four months after the House formally launched its impeachment inquiry.

A new national poll has found Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden virtually tied in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, with just three days to go until the Iowa caucuses.

According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Sanders is attracting the support of 27% of Democrats acroos the country, while Biden stands at 26%. This marks the first time in the outlets’ polling that Sanders has led the primary.

Elizabeth Warren is in third place at 15%, and no other candidate makes it into the double digits.

National polls are not very helpful for predicting the winner of the early voting states, but Sanders’ national polling surge comes as a couple of recent surveys have also shown him narrowly pulling ahead in Iowa.

Sanders is also the favorite to win the second voting state, New Hampshire, so the other candidates, namely Biden, will have to find a way to stop Sanders’ momentum if they want a shot at the nomination.

Yesterday we reported that a stretch of Trump’s border wall between the Californian town of Calexico and Mexicali in Mexico had blown over on the Mexican side during high winds.

Today things get worse for the wall, one of the president’s landmark pledges in the 2016 election. The Washington Post reports that US border officials and others say it will probably “require the installation of hundreds of storm gates to prevent flash floods from undermining or knocking it over, gates that must be left open for months every summer during ‘monsoon season’ in the desert”.

“The open, unmanned gates in remote areas already have allowed for the easy entry of smugglers and migrants into the United States,” the paper adds.

You can see a picture of the storm gates in the tweet below:

One of the Democratic contenders has dropped out of the primary race ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday … John Delaney, the former Maryland congressman who has been polling at about half a per cent.

He told CNN he was clear he would not have got enough support in Iowa, and warned fellow Democrats against nominating Bernie Sanders, saying the leftwing senator’s policies would make our job “so much harder in terms of beating Donald Trump. And I also think that’s not real governing.”

Who is Lamar Alexander, the senator who seems to have sunk the chance of Democrats calling witnesses and opened the door to Donald Trump’s swift acquittal?

Alexander, who has represented Tennessee in the Senate since 2003, was seen by Democrats as a possible target in their hunt for four votes to enable them to call witnesses because he is a moderate and he is retiring this year, so he cannot suffer the sort of electoral damage Trump has often tried to mete out to his GOP enemies.

But last night Alexander revealed his thinking, releasing a statement saying that he felt that senators needed to hear no further evidence, since Democrats had proved their case against Trump – but, crucially, that case “does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense”.

The 79-year-old Alexander was education secretary under George HW Bush and governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987, making headlines during the 1978 election campaign when he walked 1,000 miles across the state. A former lawyer, he ran in the Republican presidential primaries in 1996 and 2000, with little success.

As a senator he has worked in a bipartisan fashion, notably on education reforms and on trying to find a compromise to shore up Barack Obama’s signature healthcare changes, under threat from Trump and other Republicans. His statement overnight made a point of showing his dissatisfaction with the lack of bipartisanship involved in Trump’s impeachment.

“The framers believed that there should never, ever be a partisan impeachment. That is why the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate for conviction. Yet not one House Republican voted for these articles,” he said. The same statement revealed that he would not be joining the Democrats in either of the crucial votes expected to conclude Trump’s impeachment.

If today does turn out to be the end of the road for Trump’s impeachment, there will surely be some soul-searching in the Democratic party about whether or not they made the right decision in triggering this process.

Democratic leaders went into it knowing it was almost certain Trump would be acquitted, but they hoped to put his impeachment on the record for posterity, gum up his legislative agenda, and damage him ahead of this November’s election.

They seem to have succeeded on the first two counts, but the jury is probably out on the final point – and we won’t be able to judge that for sure until election night.

Certainly Trump and the Republicans have been forcefully making the case that the impeachment process was an attempt by the Democrats to overturn Americans’ democratic choice in 2016, and take away their democratic choice this year. “Washington Dems have spent the last 3 years trying to overturn the last election – and we will make sure they face another crushing defeat in the NEXT ELECTION,” the president tweeted overnight following a rally in Iowa.

That argument may succeed in rallying support for Trump.

But Democrats may feel that if even half a percentage point ends up being knocked off Trump’s vote tally by impeachment, that’s a success.

Polling so far has been a bit inconclusive. More Americans have consistently supported putting him through the impeachment process than oppose it – although that support has never been higher than 52%.

Support for removing him has been more flaky – after starting surprisingly strongly earlier this year, it dropped below opposition in December and at present the two are running neck and neck.

Meanwhile Trump’s approval rating remains pretty much where it has been since mid-2018, with around 52% disapproving of the president and 44% approving. None of the many dramas that have shaken Trump’s presidency in the last 18 months have substantially shifted those figures.

Good morning. Today Donald Trump could become the third US president to be acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial.

Senators will reconvene at around 1pm ET (6pm UK) for two more hours of debate on each side.

They will then vote on whether or not to call witnesses. A vote for witnesses would extend the impeachment trial and would probably lead to John Bolton being called. Trump’s former national security adviser claims in his forthcoming book that the president directly linked a delay in military aid to Ukraine to a condition that the Ukrainian government investigate one of his Democratic rivals, Joe Biden – the issue at the heart of the impeachment proceedings.

Democrats need four Republicans to vote with them to call witnesses, and seem to have got the support of Mitt Romney and Susan Collins. Another moderate, Lisa Murkowski, said she would sleep on it.

But last night one of the other senators they have been targetting, Lamar Alexander, said that “there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense”.

Although what Trump had done was “inappropriate”, Alexander said, the misconduct did “not meet the US Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense”.

He added:

The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.

That would leave the vote at a 50-50 tie. Chief justice John Roberts could break the tie – but he may just allow the motion to fall, meaning no witnesses.

If that vote fails, Republicans will push for a swift vote on whether to convict Trump. Since 20 GOP senators would need to switch sides to do that, the president is almost certain to be acquitted.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, gave a hint last night that he hadn’t quite given up hope, hinting that his party could use some sort of delaying tactics to thwart Republicans’ plans for a quick decision.

“The minority has rights, and we will exercise those rights,” he said. Asked for further details, he said: “We’re not going to get into that here. Our focus right now is on getting the four.”

We’ll have full coverage of the trial – and all other major developments in US politics – throughout the day.

Meanwhile most of the Democrats running for president – except for those in the Senate – are in Iowa ahead of Monday’s caucuses, which kick off the primary race in earnest.

And secretary of state Mike Pompeo is in Ukraine – becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit Ukraine since the impeachment process began last year – where he will hold a joint press conference with president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Here is some of our impeachment coverage from yesterday: