Who will blink first?

This sort of strategic tangle is quite different from the debates that led up to the president’s impeachment, which were charged with a kind of moral and legal urgency. The questions then presented a challenge of immediate importance: What sort of behavior by a president so steps outside the bounds of what Americans should consider acceptable that the House should act to remove him from office? To this question, there was a clear right answer, and the House acted to establish its view that Trump had breached his oath of office.

Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic: The serious silliness of impeachment

The trouble is that, in the absence of any real doubt over the president’s impending acquittal by the Senate, the questions that remain are not moral. They are strategic questions about what the goal of a Senate trial should be—and tactical questions about how best to achieve it. For Democrats, the goal appears to be to use the trial to erode the president’s prospects for reelection in November. This goal includes presenting as much new evidence unavailable during the House proceeding as possible. For the Senate Republican leadership, by contrast, the goal is to make the trial go away as quickly as possible and to prevent it from metastasizing into a larger search for evidence of presidential misconduct.

In the tactical pursuit of such goals, the answers are far less clear-cut than they are when dealing with constitutional first principles. A lot of commentators are speaking about the current standoff as though it were not a negotiation between savvy legislators but some great moral crusade. But when and how the House delivers articles of impeachment to the Senate depends, for both Democrats and Republicans, on complicated cost-benefit calculations with many different inputs. And crucially, some of these inputs are not publicly known—and probably not known to McConnell, Schumer, and Pelosi, either. So the best way to understand the current contest is as a game of poker. Some of the cards the public can see; some it can’t. Some the players can see; some they can’t.

The big unseen cards are the votes of swing Republicans on the questions of early dismissal and calling witnesses. A motion to dismiss requires 51 senators, as does a motion to block a witness. That means that if the 53 Republican senators stick together, they can sustain a motion at any time to dismiss the trial. And they can also, even if they don’t stick together for a motion to dismiss, block the impeachment managers from calling their witnesses. Conversely, if three or four Republicans (the exact number depends on how a specific motion is presented) vote with Democrats, the impeachment managers could keep the trial from being dismissed and could call their witnesses.

McConnell has not ruled out witnesses altogether. Rather, his pitch is that senators should vote on the question of whether to hear testimony following opening arguments by the House impeachment managers and by the president’s defense—the way the Senate handled matters in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. He hinted in remarks on the Senate floor on Friday that the Senate might take up a motion to dismiss the case against the president following those opening arguments, referencing a similar unsuccessful motion by Democrats during the Clinton impeachment.