It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.
But this week, Sen Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.
Few Republicans are inclined to convict Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, McConnell, R-Ky, sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half a dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face reelection next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.
It’s people like Sen Susan Collins, R-Maine, who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.
“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Collins said.
McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake,” without naming Trump.
The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistleblower complaint that sparked the inquiry.
They grew more worried still Thursday, after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, undercut the president’s defense by saying that Trump had indeed withheld security aid from Ukraine in order to spur an investigation of his political rivals.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who is seen as potentially open to removing Trump from office — told reporters that a president should never engage in the kinds of actions that Mulvaney appeared to acknowledge.
“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” she said. “Period.”
