Trump impeachment: president faces key vote on calling witnesses

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.

In another reminder of the stark contradictions and departures from past precedent this impeachment hearing has thrown up, lawyers for the Trump administration argued yesterday, in a separate legal proceeding, that a president can be impeached over failure to comply with subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives, reports Oliver Laughland.

Of the two articles of impeachment Donald Trump is currently being tried on, one relates to obstruction of Congress due to his administration’s decision to block witnesses and other evidence requested by the House. Trump’s lawyers have argued repeatedly that the president cannot be impeached over this offense, suggesting the president has a right to protect the executive branch from requests from Congress.

On Thursday, however, during entirely separate legal proceedings, a Justice Department lawyer argued in federal court that the president could be impeached over ignoring subpoenas. The proceedings related to the administration’s handling of the 2020 census, an issue being probed by the Democratic-controlled House.

In this case, too, the Trump administration is refusing to hand over certain evidence. DOJ lawyer James Burnham told a DC federal judge that while it was the president’s right to ignore the subpoenas, Congress had other powers, including impeachment, to hold the executive to account.

The news travelled to an outraged Adam Schiff, one of the Democrat impeachment managers, on Thursday evening and drew derision and laughter from senators on the jury.

“In the category of you can’t make this stuff up,” Schiff said. “The judge says if the Congress can’t enforce its subpoenas in court, then what remedy is there? And the Justice Department lawyer’s response is impeachment.”

The Justice Department later issued a statement, attempting to clarify Burnham’s remarks: “The point we made in court is simply that Congress has numerous political tools it can use in battles with the Executive Branch — appropriations, legislation, nominations, and potentially in some circumstances even impeachment.”

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.

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.”

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.