(Elie Mystal) Don't Count the Senate Out on Impeachment

(TheNation) To convict Trump on impeachment charges, 20 GOP senators will need to break ranks. Here’s how that can happen.

Democrats in the House of Representatives will eventually get around to filing impeachment charges against President Donald Trump. Ukraine envoy Bill Taylor has laid out the quid pro quo that Trump and Rudolph Giuliani orchestrated to pressure Ukraine into investigating Trump’s political rivals. We’re now in an episode of Columbo (Google it, kids). In the first scene we’ve been shown the crime and the culprit; now we’re just watching to see when everybody else figures it out.

But has anybody tried? Has anybody rattled the cages of these elected officials? Do the American people even know which cages to rattle?

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Still, despite what fatalistic Democrats and pundits tell you, a conviction in the Senate is not hopeless. The Daily Caller, a conservative website I only check when I want to feel morally and intellectually superior to others, claims to have done a poll of all 53 Republican senators. They found that only seven of them dismissed impeachment outright—and many of those seven staked their dismissals on process concerns, which will be hard to stick to after all the evidence is laid bare during a televised Senate trial. All of this suggests that there is a lot of room to move the Republican caucus.

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Towards that end, I have divided the Republican Senate into four groups.
GROUP A: THE RETIRING OR UP FOR REELECTION. 23 people who will have to vote on whether to convict an obviously corrupt president and then face the voters.

GROUP B: REPUBLICANS WITH AN ALLEGED CONSCIENCE. Don’t get me wrong, I think all of these people, with the exception of Murkowski, are bald-faced hypocrites. These 10 ten people damn well know that extorting a foreign government to investigate a political rival in exchange for weapons to fight Russia warrants removal from office.

GROUP C: THE ONES WHO KNOW THE VOTERS WILL NEVER FORGET. These senators are not up for reelection in 2020. But there’s no reasonable universe where these people should be able to acquit Trump and then hang onto their jobs when their election cycle is up.

GROUP D: AT LEAST WE TRIED. These people are not going to vote to convict the president. But let’s do the math the other way. Instead of counting to 20 Republicans as I have been doing, let’s try to count to the 34 Republicans needed to acquit the president. This “at least we tried” group represents 17 votes, half the needed number. Scroll back up through the previous groups. Are you sure that Trump has 17 additional votes?

Trump’s entire defense rests on his belief that there aren’t 20 Republicans with the courage to cross him. What if he’s wrong?
https://www.thenation.com/article/impeachment-senate-republicans/

(LONG article so I snipped & shortened best I could)