The New Yorker:

On Friday night, the Democratic House managers completed their presentation to the Senate of the evidence that Donald Trump abused his office, by trying to extort the government of Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and then obstructed justice, by ordering officials throughout the executive branch to ignore congressional subpoenas. On Saturday morning, Trump’s White House legal team began its defense of the President, arguing he did nothing wrong.

If the Washington soothsayers are proved right, and they probably will be, the outcome of the impeachment trial has been predetermined: a rapid acquittal for Trump. The Times reported on Friday that when the Senate votes again on whether to call live witnesses and view undisclosed documents, probably sometime next week, Democrats are unlikely to get the four Republican votes that they need. Soon after that vote, this could be all over, with Trump ballyhooing and gloating over the verdict.

Such an outcome would be a victory of tribalism and power politics over jurisprudence and justice. The Senate Republicans may well vote to acquit Trump, but they will not be able to erase the record that Adam Schiff and his colleagues laid down clearly, methodically, and meticulously over three days of arguments. As my colleague Susan B. Glasser noted on Thursday, in one of her daily impeachment diaries, the House Democrats “made a polished, impassioned stab at convincing their audience, dramatizing their case with an attention-grabbing presentation (designed to keep the senators awake, perhaps?) that included video clips from Trump himself; his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; and many of the key witnesses from the House’s televised impeachment proceedings.”

As they went along, the House managers were also careful to point to gaps in the record that could have been filled if the President hadn’t prevented many key witnesses and documents from being presented to Congress. Without being overly melodramatic, the Democratic representatives also highlighted the moral burden that rests on the fifty-three Republican senators who will determine Trump’s fate. In terms of the trial verdict, this may all have been in vain. But the verdict of history will be very different.

Nobody who watched even some of the House managers’ presentation could be in any doubt that there was, indeed, an illicit scheme to coerce Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, into announcing an investigation into a Ukrainian company that employed Hunter Biden; that this scheme was carried out with Trump’s knowledge, and at his behest; and that the President and his staff did all they possibly could to prevent the details from emerging. “He tried to cheat, he got caught, and then he worked hard to cover it up,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, one of the House managers, noted on Friday, in a succinct summary of the case.

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