David A. Graham: We still don’t know what happened with Ukraine

The Democratic presentation of evidence has certainly been repetitive. Representative Adam Schiff and his team say that their goal is to make the case against the president as clear as possible, but the repetition is also a political ploy, designed to pound the facts into the minds of any members of the general public who are watching and to ensure that as many hear them as possible.

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said much of what’s been presented is new. “I’ve learned a lot,” he said. “Everybody has. Senators didn’t know the case. They really didn’t. We didn’t stay glued to the television. We haven’t read the transcripts.”

More of Kennedy’s colleagues, however, have complained about the lack of novelty.

“They’re really not bringing forth new information,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said on CNN on Friday.

That deserves to be flagged for a taunting penalty. Barrasso, along with the rest of the Republican caucus, voted against 11 Democratic amendments to the impeachment rules that would have allowed for witnesses to be called and documents to be subpoenaed. (One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, broke ranks—on just one of the amendments.)

Republicans know that this opposition to gathering new evidence is unpopular. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that an amazing 72 percent of Americans want witnesses called in the Senate. (You can barely get three-quarters of Americans to agree on mom and apple pie in 2020.) An ABC News/Washington Post poll finds more modest but still impressive two-thirds support.

So the Republicans punted the decision, saying that although they wouldn’t agree to the Democratic requests at the outset of the trial, they’d vote on the idea after both sides presented their cases. Democrats said this was a farce—who’s heard of a trial where witnesses are called only after the prosecution and defense rest?—but they couldn’t do much about it.

With the end of the arguments now in sight—Trump’s lawyers get up to three days to make their case, and then senators will have a chance to ask questions—it appears that Democrats will not win over enough Republicans to the cause of calling witnesses. The GOP has an explanation, CNN reports:

GOP senators are privately and publicly raising concerns that issuing subpoenas—to top officials like acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton and for documents blocked by the White House—will only serve to drag out the proceedings. Plus, many say there’s little appetite for such a time-consuming fight, given that legal battles may ultimately not be successful and could force the courts to rule on hugely consequential constitutional issues about the separation of powers between the branches of government.

The argument is mind-bending. Republicans have said that if Democrats wanted to gather more evidence for impeachment, they should have done so in the House, before passing articles of impeachment—Democrats were simply in too much of a hurry. Yet here, Senate Republicans are leaning toward not gathering too much evidence, because they are in too much of a hurry.