On Friday, the Senate voted 51-49 against calling witnesses to President Trump’s impeachment trial. The vote will effectively lay to rest any hope that an extended impeachment trial could convict Trump, either in the Senate or in the public eye.

Many will complain that the Senate’s vote is nakedly partisan, and they’re right; in that sense, the trial will end the same way that it began.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and SU Law Distinguished Visiting Lecturer David Cay Johnston says, “What you’re seeing in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is that he’s not the problem but he’s the symptom of the atrophy of our democratic institutions.”

I agree with that assessment, but I’ve come to the same conclusion a bit differently.

Impeachment manager Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) opening statement nakedly spelled out what the mission of the impeachment trial was, saying “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

And here lies the statement that gives the game away from the start. The impeachment inquiry, whether you support it or not, was the Democrats’ attempt to circumvent the 2020 election. Why book flights to Michigan and Wisconsin when you can hold votes from the comfort of the Senate?

Critics of the Republican’s vote on witnesses have framed their choice as one of putting the party over country. What if that analysis is backward? The removal of President Trump would be disastrous for the body politic.

Johnston argues “All of the folks saying this is a coup are missing that Mike Pence becomes the president. I don’t think it’s de-stabilizing at all.”

On the contrary, once partisan conflict escalates, de-escalation is almost impossible.

In the first 150 years of our nation, one president was impeached. Two of the last four presidents have now been impeached, and the removal of Trump would codify impeachment as a legitimate political weapon, not a last resort reserved for the gravest of situations.

Impeachment is not grounded in the way that a judicial proceeding is in our courts. The same acts can be cited as serious grounds for impeachment or laughed off as failing to meet the standard however the vote tally demands.

Impeachment essentially is whatever our representatives make of it, and that is why normalizing it is so dangerous.

If Trump were to be removed, there would be no turning back. Any hope for a return to normalcy would evaporate. The response to a Trump impeachment would not be a return to a more civil politics, but a declaration of all-out partisan war.

Schiff could not have been more wrong, the Trump presidency must be affirmed or rebuked at the ballot box. Democrats have tried to squirm out of the looming 2020 confrontation, and impeachment was the final card they had left to play.

During the two-year 2016 election hangover, Democrats and legacy media waited with bated breath for the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The desperation was palpable.

Mueller was the last hope that what happened in November 2016 could be rectified by the quilled pen of liberal process. ‘This can’t have happened, this can’t have been legal, can’t it?’

The attitude being that the Trump presidency couldn’t possibly be allowed by our institutions, somehow order had to be restored before 2020.

And that brings us back to impeachment. In the shadow of what should be a winnable election for the Democrats, they’ve circled the wagons for one last blustering and disappointing stab at defeating Trump without reckoning with the forces that brought him into office in the first place.

Now, Democrats will have to put to bed their daydreams that our democratic norms and the forces of justice could ride in on their white horses to defeat Trump and begrudgingly accept that to do so they will have to win an election.

Michael Furnari is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at mpfurnar@syr.edu. He can be followed on Twitter at @FurnariMichael.

Published on February 2, 2020 at 8:11 pm