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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is apparently not attempting to ensure Republicans vote against impeaching former President Donald Trump.
Instead, McConnell is sitting back and allowing Senate Republicans to vote however they choose in the impeachment trial, according to Bloomberg.
“The final vote on Trump’s impeachment is a matter of conscience,” the report said.
The Bloomberg report added:
McConnell, in a leadership meeting Monday night, said the same things he has said publicly, a person familiar with the matter said.
On Feb. 2, he told reporters: “We’re all going to listen to what the lawyers have to say and making the arguments and work our way through it.”
McConnell has been telling Republican senators since mid-January that this would be a “vote of conscience.”
Establishment Republicans are urging Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to quietly greenlight President Donald Trump’s conviction in the Senate.
Reports are emerging that McConnell is being privately urged to support a conviction vote in the Senate’s Republican caucus by prominent Republicans and former White House officials.
In talking to reporters off the record, one Republican member of Congress made clear that the goal to forbid former President Donald Trump from ever holding elected office again is a commonly held goal not among Democrats and Progressives.
“Mitch said to me he wants Trump gone,” one Republican member of Congress told reporters in confidence.
“It is in his political interest to have him gone. It is in the GOP interest to have him gone. The question is, do we get there?”
The lobbying by influential Washington insiders to disqualify Trump from ever holding office in the future started in the US House of Representatives after the January 6th chaos at the US Capitol Building.
The secretive lobbying began to center on McConnell after the House’s impeachment vote.
Last month, McConnell said Trump and his allies were the catalysts for “storming” of the Capitol Building on January 6th.
Several videos contradict the use of the word “storming,” showing people casually walking into the Capitol Building through open doors stationed with Capitol Hill police officers who stood by without taking action.
McConnell, who himself has not ruled out voting to convict the former President, said Trump was directly responsible for provoking the actions on January 6th, saying:
“The last time the Senate convened, we had just reclaimed the Capitol from violent criminals who tried to stop Congress from doing our duty. This mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like. But we pressed on.”
Meanwhile, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul successfully convinced all but five Senate Republicans to vote with him in a declaration that the attempt to impeach a president who is no longer sitting, with the excuse that he incited, a riot is completely unconstitutional.
If the 45 Senate Republicans who voted to end the impeachment trial before it began to intend to vote the same way during the Senate trial, then Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will not be able to round up the two-thirds majority required to convict President Trump.