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    Why Ben Sasse and Veteran Republicans Soured on Senate Runs

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    WASHINGTON — The Senate isn’t what it used to be.For evidence, consider the case of Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican with four years to go in his second term who is seeking the presidency of the University of Florida. His looming departure makes him the latest lawmaker to prematurely bail out of the institution once considered the pinnacle of American political life outside the presidency.Joining him on the way out the door this year are some of the most savvy and experienced legislators on the Republican side — Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania — all pretty much in the prime of their careers by Senate age standards. Two more senior senators, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, age 82, and Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, 88, are also retiring.On top of those losses, Senate Republicans could not entice several Republican governors to run for Senate this year, even though they would have been strong contenders for election next month, candidacies that would have boosted Republican chances of capturing a majority in the chamber that is now very much in play.Senators tick off a litany of frustrations: Their constituents are difficult, the travel is grueling, fund-raising is joyless and omnipresent, the threat of primaries is a pain and they are constantly pestered by the press. Republicans have the added burden of navigating treacherous waters where they risk blowback from the base if they don’t profess sufficient fealty to MAGA tenets and former President Donald J. Trump and draw scalding criticism from the opposing side if they don’t show sufficient disdain for Mr. Trump and his supporters.Most importantly, some say, the once-rewarding business of legislative bargaining and high-stakes lawmaking has lost its luster. The big deals are most often cut in the Capitol leadership suites these days, and presented as a fait accompli to the rank-and-file. Given the reluctance among many to take politically tough votes, members have few opportunities to push their own amendments, and their influence is often reduced to railing against the finished product on the Senate floor when few are listening.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.“I think the Senate has essentially, for most purposes, stopped legislating,” said Mr. Blunt, 72, who opted against seeking a third term in the Senate after serving in the leadership in both the House and Senate. “The opportunity to be a committee chairman is not what it was 12, 15 or even 10 years ago. The opportunity to take a bill through the committee process and go to the Senate floor and see it debated and voted on is almost nonexistent.”Then there is just the plain nastiness of the current social media-fueled political climate.“The lack of respect for our institutions and the vicious nature of politics today is getting tiresome to people,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who mourned this year’s retirees. “They have gotten seniority, and they would be able to make a real difference. Their influence and effectiveness would only grow if they stayed in the Senate. Too many are concluding it is no longer worth it.”On one hand, the likely departure of Mr. Sasse, 50, to Gainesville, is something of a surprise, considering he was just re-elected to a second term in 2020 and showed some independence in a willingness to challenge Mr. Trump. Democrats saw him as someone to court when trying to craft bipartisan legislation, and some Republicans regarded him as a potential presidential prospect.But Mr. Sasse also made it clear from the very beginning of his service that he was skeptical of the value of an institution that was losing ground with the public and its own members. In his maiden speech in 2015, he attacked the partisanship employed by both sides.“Few believe bare-knuckled politics are a substitute for principled governing,” he said about his constituents back home. “And does anyone doubt that many on both the right and the left now salivate for more of these radical tactics? The people despise us all,” he said, posing this question: “Would anything be lost if the Senate didn’t exist?”Senator Roy Blunt opted against seeking a third term in the Senate after serving in the leadership in both the House and Senate.Al Drago for The New York TimesA group of Republican governors seemed to consider that question in recent months and answer “not much” when it came to their own political ambitions. Despite fervent pleas from Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, and many other Republicans, four governors considered top Senate candidates — Phil Scott of Vermont, Doug Ducey of Arizona, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — all passed on running this year, even though the midterm environment started out favoring Republicans.The decision by Governor Sununu was particularly upsetting to Republicans since he was rated as by far the strongest challenger to Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, who had been considered vulnerable but is now in position to win a second term and help her party hang onto its majority.Governors have always chafed at running and serving in the Senate after their experience as state executives provided them more leeway and authority than working in a creaky gang of 100.But in the past, the Senate was still seen as a springboard to national prominence and a possible presidential run, and many governors chose to give it a try despite misgivings. Thirteen former governors currently sit in the Senate and another may join them if Pete Ricketts, the outgoing governor of Nebraska, ends up in Mr. Sasse’s seat under an appointment until the 2024 elections. Mr. McConnell, in an interview with CNN, made it clear that Mr. Ricketts is his preferred choice.The refusal of those governors does not mean no one wants in to serve in the chamber. Far from it. Across the nation, candidates are spending tens of millions of dollars clamoring for admission. But in place of those governors who refused to run, Republicans got lesser-known and more problematic candidates such as hard-right hopefuls Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Republicans who are less likely to win and who are far less likely to be Senate deal-makers of the sort who are leaving.That prospect is vexing for those who remain.“Those are capable legislators who have done a lot of good in their time,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, lamenting the departing lawmakers. “Although we have different ideologies, priorities and political values, we have gotten to yes on dozens of bills between us.”The race for the exits is the best evidence yet that the political and policy allures of the Senate are rapidly diminishing. More

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      These Senators Grilling Judge Jackson Have Ambitions Beyond Senate

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      Four of the senators on the panel grilling Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are known to have dreams beyond the walls of the U.S. Senate.Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president, the old saw goes.So as the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes this week to consider the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a Supreme Court seat, we’ll be watching the panel not just for probing questions about her judicial philosophy but also for clues to 2024.Four Republican senators on the committee have flashed signs of larger aspirations, and they share a lot else in common. All are men who are roughly within a decade of one another in age. All have one or two Ivy League degrees. Each has sought to mold the Republican Party in his own image. And all approach these hearings knowing they are just as much onstage as Jackson is.For the supremely ambitious, a Supreme Court nomination battle is an irresistible opportunity. It’s a chance to build email lists, rustle up campaign cash and impress base voters. Remember how Kamala Harris used the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to preview her 2020 presidential run?It’s still early to be thinking about the 2024 presidential race, but candidates are already engaged in “shadow jockeying,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa conservative. “Everybody’s waiting to see what Trump does.”Even so, Republican activists are looking for a champion, said Rachel Bovard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “They want to see that you have a pulse,” she said.But big hearings can be perilous, too. Senators can’t be seen as “playing for the cameras,” Quin Hillyer, a conservative columnist, told us. More and more Republican voters, he said, want “toughness without histrionics.”With that in mind, here are the four Republican senators to watch:Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe hard-linerTom Cotton, 44, of Arkansas has two degrees from Harvard and served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger. He’s been an increasingly frequent visitor to Iowa and New Hampshire of late — telltale signs that he has caught the presidential bug.Cotton is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China. But he has also staked out hard-right positions on domestic policy, with calls to restrict legal immigration and roll back criminal justice reforms.In a speech this month, Cotton embraced the Republican Party’s “proud, patriotic and populist” direction under Trump. “We’re the party of the common man, the worker, the farmer, the cop on the beat,” he said. But he broke with Trump over the First Step Act, which he blamed for the early release of “child predators, carjackers and gang members.”Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at CPAC in Orlando, Fla., last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe former Tea PartierTed Cruz, 51, of Texas ran for president once before and might again, his allies say. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cruz has been a major force in Republican politics since entering the Senate in 2013.He has gone through three main phases during his time in Washington. First he was a Tea Partier known for defying Republican leaders over government spending. Then he was a presidential candidate who came in second to Trump in 2016 by running as a conservative true believer. And now he’s a beard-sporting Trump ally who preaches “America First” dogma with the zeal of a convert.Cruz once took to the national spotlight like a moth to flame. But in recent years, that spotlight has been harsh: His vacation to Cancún during a storm that left millions of Texans without electricity or running water drew withering scorn, and his recent apology to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, for calling the Jan. 6 rioters “terrorists” was seen as groveling.He has been subdued about Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, calling for her to be treated with “dignity and decorum.” After meeting her in his office last week, he joked on a podcast that he was “highly suspect” of her — for rejecting his offer of Cuban coffee.Close observers of Cruz say he appears less calculating, more relaxed and more authentically himself than in the past — potentially meaning he has set aside his presidential ambitions or simply that he’s trying out a different approach.“I think Cruz looks at it as, nobody’s going to beat him to the conservative lane,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist. “He may not need to pick every single fight.”Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri also speaking at CPAC last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe young upstartJosh Hawley, 42, of Missouri, is an evangelical Christian who promotes traditional values. That puts him on a potential collision course with Cruz and with former Vice President Mike Pence, said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.Hawley has carved out a significant following on the right by going after tech companies for what he calls their alliance with the “radical left.” And though he has said he’s not running for president in 2024, he hasn’t exactly spurned the speculation, either.Hawley is an unapologetic supporter of the Jan. 6 protesters. And though he condemned the violence at the Capitol as “horrific,” his campaign has put a photo of himself hailing the Jan. 6 crowd on mugs (“the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!”). He has raised millions by complaining that Democrats are attempting to “cancel” him. On March 1, he led his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference by noting his objection to the certification of the Electoral College votes. “I wasn’t backing down then; I haven’t changed my mind now,” he said to raucous applause.Allies say that Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, sees the Supreme Court as his domain. Of the four senators, he’s the only one who has bucked the wishes of Senate Republican leaders by forcefully attacking Jackson’s record. Fact-checkers have found his claims wanting, and the White House called them “toxic.” He likely won’t be able to stop her confirmation. But the fact that Hawley is fighting Jackson’s nomination at all could endear him to Republicans who want a brawler in their corner.“His goal appears to be to make Ted Cruz look like the statesman of the group,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant.Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe prairie philosopherBen Sasse, 50, of Nebraska is a former university president who has mapped out his own path as a sporadic Trump critic. Sasse has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale. But unlike the other senators, he embraces and even flaunts his intellectual roots.Sasse wrote his dissertation about “culture-warring entrepreneurs” who seized on the debate over prayer in schools to power Ronald Reagan’s political ascent — an early expression of Sasse’s pox-on-both-houses approach to politics. A lone wolf in the Senate, Sasse often positions himself above what he derides as the “tribal” politics of Washington. In noting Jackson’s nomination, for instance, he said the Judiciary Committee has been “a place of grandstanding and rabid partisanship.”“Grandstanding” is a word Sasse employs frequently — as when he tangled last week on the Senate floor with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, over aid to Ukraine. The skirmish caught the eye of conservative pundits, who saw it as a sign that Sasse is seeking attention.But for what? If there’s a lane for Sasse in a coming presidential election, it’s likely as a Never Trumper or an independent. He voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment, a no-no for Republican base voters.What to read The ex-wife of Eric Greitens, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, accused him in court documents of knocking her down and confiscating her keys, phone and wallet during an argument in 2018.Republicans are relitigating the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, Glenn Thrush writes, even as they prepare to question Jackson in confirmation hearings that began with opening statements on Monday.Erica L. Green looked back at Jackson’s years at Harvard University, where the future judge learned to navigate “one of the most elite and white institutions in the country.”FrameworkIn North Carolina, Pat McCrory, the Republican Senate candidate, released an ad accusing his opponent Ted Budd of being soft on Russia. via YouTubeRussia becomes a campaign liabilityTo understand just how rapidly the politics of foreign policy are shifting on the right, look no farther than North Carolina — where being associated with Donald Trump’s views on Russia is now a political problem.The state is electing a replacement this year for Senator Richard Burr, who is retiring. On the Republican side, the May 17 primary is largely a two-way contest between Pat McCrory, a former governor, and Representative Ted Budd, a far-right lawmaker who was endorsed by Trump.As the war in Ukraine broke out, McCrory released an ad accusing Budd of being soft on Russia. The ad shows a clip of Budd calling Vladimir Putin “intelligent” — much as Trump praised the Kremlin leader’s aggression as “genius.”“While Ukrainians bled and died,” a narrator scolds, “Congressman Budd excused their killer.”In a sign that McCrory’s attack might be landing, Budd’s allies responded with a response ad calling it “a low down, dirty hit job.” The ad quotes Budd as saying, “Putin is evil. He’s an international thug,” and emphasizes his support for Ukraine.Each side has spent only a few thousand dollars on the ads so far, indicating the goal was to generate free media coverage and not to reach voters directly.But the exchange underscores how being perceived as an apologist for Putin is suddenly a bad look in a Republican primary thanks to Volodymyr Zelensky, the charismatic president of Ukraine. By presenting an alternate model of strength and machismo, said Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, “Zelensky has changed the whole dynamic of the Republican Party.” Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Why Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile?If they don’t disown Trump, he will continue to own them.Mr. Wehner, who served in various roles in the three Republican administrations before the Trump administration, is a contributing Opinion writer.Feb. 14, 2021Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFive years ago, during a campaign rally in Iowa, Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” What no one knew at the time, but what the just-concluded impeachment trial showed in vivid and at times sickening detail, is that Mr. Trump was foreshadowing something worse.The former president didn’t stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue; he stood in the middle of the Ellipse. He didn’t use a gun; the weapons he used were his words and Twitter account. Mr. Trump didn’t commit murder; instead, urged on by their beloved leader, a mob of hundreds of Trump loyalists “stormed and occupied the Capitol, disrupting the final electoral count in a shocking display of violence that shook the core of American democracy,” in the words of The Times. As a result of Mr. Trump’s actions a theoretical person on Fifth Avenue didn’t die; five actual human beings did, with many others badly injured.But what Mr. Trump got right was in prophesying that he could act maliciously — and even seditiously — and still maintain the overwhelming support of both his base and Republican lawmakers. Representative Liz Cheney, who bravely voted to impeach Mr. Trump, correctly said that there’s never been a greater betrayal by a president of his office and his oath to the Constitution. The impeachment trial provided overwhelming, irrefutable — and in fact unrefuted — evidence that Mr. Trump was guilty as charged. He not only incited an insurrection; he delighted in watching it unfold in all of its violence, all of its devastation, all of its horror. For hours he did nothing to stop it.Yet in the aftermath of that, the vast majority of Republican lawmakers stood where they always have for the last four years: shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump. And precisely because they have done so, time and time again, we became inured to how troubling the alliance between Mr. Trump and the Republican Party turned out to be, with Mr. Trump’s senatorial defenders (or should I say praetorian guard) — Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and others — not only shameless and remorseless, but belligerent.So why did Republicans, with seven honorable exceptions — Senators Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Bill Cassidy, Richard Burr and Ben Sasse — profess their loyalty to a sociopath who has been exiled to Mar-a-Lago? Why do they continue to defend a man who lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes, whose recklessness after the election cost Republicans control of the Senate, and who is causing a flight from the Republican Party?There are different, sometimes overlapping explanations. For some, it’s a matter of cynical ambition. They want to win over the loyalty of Trump supporters, who comprise a huge part of the base of the Republican Party. For others, it’s recognizing that standing up to Mr. Trump might make life quite unpleasant and even dangerous for them, exposing them to hazards that range from primary challenges to physical attack. And for still others, it’s driven by such antipathy toward the left that they will not do anything Democrats ask them to do, even if doing so is the right thing to do. These Republicans would much rather “own the libs” than side with them against a corrupt, corrosive former president.There’s also the natural human reluctance to take a stand that puts you in conflict with your own political tribe, your colleagues, your friends. And there’s this: Over the course of the Trump presidency a lot of Republicans repeatedly — sometimes daily — quarantined their conscience in order to justify to others, and to themselves, their support for an unscrupulous man.For people who are not themselves deviant to publicly defend a person who is creates cognitive dissonance and psychological conflict. It puts people at war with themselves. But over time, one step at a time, people condition themselves to make compromises. They twist themselves into moral knots as a way to justify their stance. They create a community to reinforce their rationalizations. And with each step down the moral staircase, it gets easier.There is a reason that in the Trump era we keep returning to Eastern European analogues. Upon taking office as president, the Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel said, in a New Year’s Day address in 1990, that “the worst thing is we are living in a decayed moral environment. We have become morally ill, because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another.”For nearly a half-decade, Republicans became accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. The impeachment vote was the last, best chance to break decisively with Mr. Trump. Yet once again most Republican lawmakers couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Mr. Trump still seems to haunt them, to instill fear in them. More than that, however: He has become them, weaving himself into their minds and communities so seamlessly that they are no longer capable of distinguishing their own moral sensibilities and boundaries from his, as they might once have done. After the disgraceful impeachment vote, the task for Republicans hoping to separate themselves from the Trump years, which was already hard, if not impossible, became harder still.So for conservatives who are longing for a responsible political home and for those who believe healthy conservative parties are vital to the survival of democracy, what can be done to salvage the Republican Party?To begin with, it needs leaders who are willing to say that something has gone very, very wrong. They don’t have to dwell on it, or make it the focus of their efforts every minute, but the next generation of Republican leaders cannot pretend that the last few years were politics as they ought to be. They need to acknowledge that a sickness set in and take steps to cure it.From that should emerge a recognition that change is essential. That means putting in place a new intellectual framework, to do for the Republican Party in the 2020s what Bill Clinton did for the Democratic Party and Tony Blair did for the Labour Party in the 1990s, which was to break them of bad habits and modernize them. The situation is not exactly analogous (historical analogies never are), but there are some instructive similarities.This is of course easier said than done, but Republicans need to move past cable news and talk radio. They must begin, again, to rely on think tanks and journals from various wings of the party to work toward a policy agenda to meet the challenges of the modern world, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s. Republican leaders need to change the way their party thinks about itself, and therefore the way the country thinks about the Republican Party. One way to do that is for different figures to put forward their vision for a new Republican Party, to see what gains traction.For example, Senator Romney’s Family Security Act is an ambitious policy aimed at slashing child poverty and strengthening families by reducing penalties for marriage. (It would provide a monthly cash benefit for families, amounting to $350 a month for each young child, and $250 a month for each school-age child.) There are some interesting ideas in the area of national service, including this one from the Brookings Institution’s Isabelle Sawhill and Richard Reeves, encouraging a year of national service after high school as a way to foster national unity by bringing young people of different races, ethnicities, income levels and faith backgrounds together to work toward a common purpose, but also as a pathway to college. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute is focusing his attention on ways to encourage social solidarity as a way to combat social alienation. My Times colleague David Brooks has written about this intellectual ferment on the right.Right now all this may seem aspirational or even unachievable, but this is what has to happen if there is going to be a responsible conservative alternative to the Democratic Party. A new, post-Trump Republican Party should put in place a political infrastructure that supports conservatives in primary races who are responsible, intellectually serious and interested in governing rather than theatrics. Republicans need to talk about the country’s needs, not just the threats posed by the left. Having spread conspiracy theories and served as a battering ram against reality during the last four years, the Republican Party needs to root itself firmly in the world as it actually is. It must defend itself against QAnon and its allies whenever and wherever they present themselves, not just every once in a while. It must challenge those who want to make the Republican Party the nesting place of lunacy.None of this will be easy, and it will certainly require developing new habits of thought after the Trump era. What is even more difficult is that it will require explicitly distancing the party from the irreconcilably anti-democratic and nihilistic element of Trump’s base. While post-Trump Republicans shouldn’t go out in search of a fight, this transformation cannot be accomplished without at some point confronting hard-core MAGA supporters who have made a living through lies and intimidation.A new Republican Party won’t prevail if it enters this political battle defensively, halfheartedly, apologetically. The Kevin McCarthy model — weak, timid, unprincipled, cowering — is a loser. For Mr. McCarthy to have gone hat in hand to Mar-a-Lago was shortsighted, to say the least. Mr. McCarthy may have thought that currying favor would keep Mr. Trump on side with the party in crucial 2022 House races, but, as nearly everyone can see by now, Trump’s team has only one member: himself. Whomever he does not dominate, he undermines or betrays; if Republicans do not disown him, he will continue to own them.On the flip side, over the last few weeks, we’ve seen Representative Cheney, Senator Sasse and even Mr. Trump’s first U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, distance themselves from Mr. Trump because they recognize that his destructive narcissism can never be managed or contained.That said, even if all the things that need to be done are done, and done well, the base of the party may still be too radicalized, too consumed by grievance, too enmeshed in conspiracy theories, too enamored with politics as blood sport — in a word, still too Trumpified — to reform. But because we’re only in the very early stages of the post-Trump presidency, as in one sense his acquittal demonstrates, it’s too early for fatalism. It would be irresponsible not to search for embers in the ashes.For half a decade, there have been far too few figures within the Republican Party who were willing to challenge Mr. Trump, to speak the truth people knew privately but hid publicly. But with Mr. Trump in temporary exile and the impeachment trial over, we’re about to see whether the Trump presidency was an aberration or a precursor, a parenthesis or part of a pattern. Was Mr. Trump’s acquittal the end of the Trump era or the beginning of something worse? Could this be the timid start of a new, post-Trump phase for the Republican Party?I am not sure what to think, but I know what to hope.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Seven Republican Senators Voted to Convict Trump

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentliveLatest UpdatesKey Takeaways From Day 5How Senators VotedTrump AcquittedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Seven Republican Senators Voted to Convict TrumpThe Republicans who broke with their party to find Donald J. Trump guilty were an eclectic group, bound by their shared lack of concern about retribution from the former president or his followers.Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is one of the seven Republicans who voted on Saturday to impeach former President Donald J. Trump.Credit…for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021, 6:57 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The seed for Senator Bill Cassidy’s decision to find Donald J. Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection was planted one day last fall, when he received an email from a friend that was full of the then-president’s false claims about a stolen election.Alarmed that Mr. Trump’s lies were gaining credence, Mr. Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, became part of a small minority in his party — and one of only a few officials in the South — to acknowledge President Biden’s victory. Months later, after Mr. Trump’s campaign to overturn the election culminated in the Capitol riot, Mr. Cassidy was one of only seven Republican senators who voted on Saturday to convict him.Taken at face value, Mr. Cassidy — a conservative, newly re-elected physician with a quirky streak — has little in common with the other six senators who broke with their party and found Mr. Trump guilty in the most bipartisan vote for a presidential impeachment conviction in United States history. Most were facing intense backlash on Sunday from Republicans in their states livid about the vote, as have the 10 House Republicans who supported the impeachment last month.But the senators were united by a common thread: Each of them, for their own reasons, was unafraid of political retribution from Mr. Trump or his supporters.“Two are retiring, and three are not up until 2026, and who knows what the world will look like five years from now,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “It looked pretty different five years ago than it did today. All seven of them have a measure of independence that those who have to run in 2022 in a closed Republican primary just don’t have.”For Mr. Cassidy, it was a sense of outrage at the former president’s actions, starting long before the assault on Jan. 6, that played the dominant role. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Cassidy said Mr. Trump had “trumpeted that lie” about the election for months, then sat by for hours as lawmakers and his own vice president were under attack in the Capitol and did nothing — other than to call Republican senators to ask them to continue challenging the election results.“That anger simmers in the background,” Mr. Cassidy said. “My whole life, reading about great men and women who sacrifice for our country, who sacrifice so that we could have the freedoms that we have here today — and the idea that somebody would attempt to usurp those and destroy them?”“It still angers me,” he continued. “It just angers the heck out of me.”Many Republicans privately shared Mr. Cassidy’s rage, but the fact that only seven of them were ultimately willing to find Mr. Trump guilty underscored the extraordinary fealty the former president still commands in the party. Even with Mr. Trump out of the White House, Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to cross the former president for fear of invoking his wrath and infuriating the primary voters who still adore him. All but one of the Republicans who voted to convict Mr. Trump will not face voters at the ballot box for years — or ever again, in the case of two who are set to retire in 2022.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the only one of the seven Republicans who faces re-election next year, making her vote to convict the most political risky of them all.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Cassidy won re-election in November, as did two others who voted to convict the former president — Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Ben Sasse of Nebraska — meaning they have five years before their names will appear on a ballot. Two others, Senators Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, are retiring. The other two, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, have long since established their willingness to break with their party, and particularly with Mr. Trump.Ms. Murkowski is the only one of the group facing re-election next year, making her vote the most politically risky of them all.She famously returned to Washington even after losing a Republican primary in 2010 by defeating both the Republican and Democratic nominees in an audacious write-in campaign, and she has appeared untroubled by the potential political consequences of her vote.That might be partly influenced by a change in Alaska’s voting system: Voters in November approved a measure to eliminate party primaries and institute a ranked-choice contest in which any candidate could prevail, blunting the influence of the hard-right voters who decide most Republican primaries.At the Capitol on Saturday, Ms. Murkowski said she owed it to her constituents to vote the way she did. “If I can’t say what I believe that our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?” she told reporters.And in a blistering statement on Sunday, Ms. Murkowski explained why she deemed Mr. Trump guilty.“If months of lies, organizing a rally of supporters in an effort to thwart the work of Congress, encouraging a crowd to march on the Capitol, and then taking no meaningful action to stop the violence once it began is not worthy of impeachment, conviction and disqualification,” she said, “I cannot imagine what is.”Republicans had regarded Ms. Murkowski as a senator who was likely to defect, along with Ms. Collins. The two have previously linked arms to break from their party on significant votes, including when they helped tank a Republican-led effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Ms. Collins was re-elected in November, triumphing in a brutal contest that few expected her to win, as voters reaffirmed their embrace of her long-held independent streak.“This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Collins said in a speech from the Senate floor on Saturday. “It is instead about President Trump’s failure to obey the oath he swore on Jan. 20, 2017. His actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power — the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy — were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction.”Republicans had regarded Senator Susan Collins of Maine as likely to defect.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn the weeks before the impeachment trial, Ms. Collins huddled in multiple Zoom meetings with a team of lawyers, including external advisers and members of her staff, to discuss the constitutionality of putting a former president on trial and whether Mr. Trump could mount a defense premised on his right to free speech, according to Richard H. Fallon Jr., a Harvard Law professor and adviser to Ms. Collins who participated in the discussions.“I don’t think there was any substantial disagreement at the end about the constitutional points,” he said.Mr. Cassidy’s vote to convict was less expected. A gastroenterologist who was re-elected easily in November to a second term, he is a reliable conservative. But he has shown an increasing willingness in recent weeks to buck his party in an attempt to work with Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues, and markedly less interest in humoring Mr. Trump.That approach has resulted in an intense fallout at home. The Louisiana Republican Party on Saturday moved to censure him for his vote, and Mr. Cassidy said people would be “aghast at how negative” the comments on his Facebook page had become.But he also said that he had received “a heck of a lot of support” in texts and calls from constituents — and that he expected that sentiment to grow.“The president spent two months building this up,” Mr. Cassidy said. “It’s going be hard; people just don’t flip on a deeply held belief from someone who they trust just like that. But the more the facts come out, the more that people will move to this position.”For his colleagues who are retiring, voters’ reactions were less of a concern. Neither Mr. Burr nor Mr. Toomey was a particularly vocal critic of Mr. Trump while he was in office, and both skewed fiercely conservative on policy matters, especially Mr. Toomey, a fiscal hawk and former president of the pro-business Club for Growth.But both have tangled with the former president in their own ways. As Mr. Trump continued to falsely claim that he had won the election, Mr. Toomey sharply pushed back and went so far as to blast his own colleagues for trying to overturn the results.Delegate Stacey Plaskett, Democrat of the Virgin Islands and one of the impeachment managers, reacted on Saturday as Mr. Cassidy voted to convict Mr. Trump.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Burr, then the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, subpoenaed testimony from Donald Trump Jr. in 2019 as part of his work conducting the only bipartisan congressional investigation into Russian election interference. The former president’s son responded by starting a political war against the senator in an attempt to turn his party against him.Perhaps the most predictable votes came from two of Mr. Trump’s most biting critics in the Senate: Mr. Sasse and Mr. Romney, who was the only Republican to vote to convict Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial.While the two senators have employed similarly scathing language to excoriate the former president, they are at very different points in their careers. Mr. Romney, 73, having tried and failed to reach the White House, has positioned himself as an elder statesman trying to steer the party from Mr. Trump’s influence regardless of the political fallout. Mr. Sasse, 48, a younger and ambitious up-and-comer, has staked his hopes on leading a post-Trump Republican Party.Now, Mr. Sasse is facing censure threats from the Nebraska Republican Party. An effort last year by a Republican legislator in Utah to censure Mr. Romney for his first impeachment vote fell flat after the state’s Republican governor defended the senator, who faces re-election in 2024.It is unclear how much the seven senators discussed the verdict before the vote on Saturday. But Mr. Cassidy quietly shared his decision with Mr. Burr during the closing arguments of the trial, surreptitiously passing the North Carolina Republican a note on the Senate floor.“I am a yes,” it read.Mr. Burr nodded in silent agreement.Emily Cochrane More

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      Impeach and Convict. Right Now.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyImpeach and Convict. Right Now.Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute.Opinion ColumnistJan. 6, 2021Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York TimesIt wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic.The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate, once they certify Joe Biden’s election, is to reconvene, Wednesday night if possible, to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again.To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president.From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics.He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too.All this was obvious — but was not enough to stop him. America in 2015 had many problems, many of which had gone too long ignored and were ripe for populist exploitation. But by far the biggest problem of that year was that a major political party capitulated to a thug. And the biggest problem of every subsequent year has been that more and more of that party has excused, ignored, forgiven, colluded in and celebrated his thuggery.Think of Mike Pompeo, our sycophantic secretary of state, who in March 2016 warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution,” and who, after the election had been called for Biden in November, promised “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”The Republican Party is now walking to the edge of moral irredeemability. I say this as someone who, until 2016, had always voted the straight Republican ticket and who, until this week, had hoped that Republicans would hold the Senate as a way of tilting the Biden administration to the center. I say this also of the party generally, and not of the courageous individual Republicans — Brad Raffensperger, Mitt Romney, Denver Riggleman, Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse (the list is depressingly short) — who have preserved their principles, maintained their honor and kept their heads these past five years.But there is no getting away from the extent to which leading party members and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media are complicit in creating the political atmosphere in which this Visigothic sacking of the Capitol took place.The legal hucksters, from Rudy Giuliani to Mark Levin, who promoted demonstrably debunkable claims about electoral fraud, are complicit. All of those supposedly sober-minded conservatives who encouraged the president to “pursue his legal options” (knowing full well they were bunk, but with the assurance that they would settle doubts about the validity of the vote) are complicit. The 126 House Republicans who signed on to the preposterous brief supporting the Texas lawsuit to overturn the election — flicked away in a single paragraph by the Supreme Court — are complicit. Ted Cruz, whom I once described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline” but who turns out to be considerably worse, is complicit. Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate cynics, who tried to obstruct Biden’s election certification in a transparent bid to corner the market on Trumpian craziness, are complicit. Mike Pence, who cravenly humored Trump’s fantasies right till the moment of constitutional truth, is complicit. (If there’s an argument against Trump’s removal from office, he alone is it.)Some of these charlatans are now trying to disavow Wednesday’s violence in carefully phrased tweets. But Cruz, Hawley, Pence and the other Bitter-Enders have done far more lasting damage to Congress than the mob that — merely by following their lead — physically trashed it. Broken doors can be fixed. Broken parties cannot.Above all there is the president, not complicit but wholly, undeniably and unforgivably responsible.For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule.For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday — forgive the cliché, but it’s apt here — their chickens came home to roost.Every decent society depends for its survival on its ability to be shocked — and stay shocked — by genuinely shocking behavior. Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been an assault on that idea.There is only one prescription for it now. Impeach the president and remove him from office now. Ban him forever from office now. Let every American know that, in the age of Trump, there are some things that can never be allowed to stand, most of all Trump himself.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ben Sasse Slams Republican Effort to Challenge Election

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