By Charles C. W. Cooke
Saturday, February 13, 2021
What happened on January 6 of this year, Senator Ben
Sasse told me on Monday night, represented “one of the most egregious Article
II attacks on Article I in all of U.S. history.”
For Sasse, who was one of only six Republican senators to
argue that the impeachment was constitutionally sound, at stake in the trial
was nothing less than the integrity of the Constitution itself.
“This is not,” he told me, “really about Donald Trump. It
is really about a signal to future office holders about what kind of behavior
is appropriate.” After all: “The old meaning — the nonpolitical meaning — of
the word impeach, to impeach someone’s character, is to decry certain kinds of
behavior.”
Sasse, the junior senator from Nebraska, was among the
seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump on “incitement of insurrection”
Saturday. In a series of interviews with National
Review over several days leading up to that vote, Sasse sought to explain
his thinking. The question at hand, he contended on day one of the impeachment
trial, should be seen as “chiefly an Article I vs. Article II conflict, not
chiefly as a partisan tribal conflict.
“The president is supposed to be not the just
barely-smaller-than-King executive figure in the American system,” Sasse told
me. “It’s supposed to be an administrative job where you faithfully execute the
laws. When you’re affirming the peaceful transition of power and the Article II
branch tries to stir people up by sowing more distrust in that, I have a really
hard historical time coming up with anything analogous in terms of an Article
II attack on the constitutional order. That is an unbelievably egregious attack
on a constitutional system.”
Going in, Sasse hoped to strip the proceedings of their
partisan hue. “I just believe at the level of principle the pledge that I made
when I was running for office,” he said on Monday, in the first of the series
of interviews conducted throughout the week, “which is I’ll try to do what I
think is the right thing, exercising my judgment. And if it’s only 47 percent
possible and I lose, so be it. No single senator is indispensable. It’s the
Constitution that’s indispensable.
“One of the questions I try to always ask myself in
situations like this,” he added, “is how would I be handling it if it were a
Democrat president? I think you’re going to have a bunch of people on our side
make pretty strange arguments that they wouldn’t conceivably make . . . if the
president in question were a Democrat. I want to try to work against all of
that.”
On Saturday, Sasse did just that, as one of just a
handful of Republican senators to vote for conviction.
Sasse was keen to note that he had not made up his mind
at the outset, and that he regarded his vote affirming the proceedings’
constitutionality as distinct from his eventual vote on the merits. “I come
looking for things that could complicate my current understanding of what
happened,” he told me on the first day. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that he
was starting with a certain understanding of what had happened, and that his understanding
had been strengthened by the House managers’ initial presentation. “Trump’s
lying about the election outcome is a root cause of this entire event,” he
said. “I thought [the House manager’s] argument was pretty dang effective at
tying Trump’s lead up to this entire thing.”
As the week unfolded, no evidence showed up to change
Sasse’s mind. Indeed, explaining
his vote on the floor of the Senate earlier today, he put the case against
Trump about as starkly as possible:
President Trump lied that he ‘won
the election by a landslide.’ He lied about widespread voter fraud, spreading
conspiracy theories despite losing 60 straight court challenges, many of his
losses handed down by great judges he nominated. He tried to intimidate the
Georgia secretary of state to ‘find votes’ and overturn that state’s election.
He publicly and falsely declared that Vice President Pence could break his
constitutional oath and simply declare a different outcome. The president
repeated these lies when summoning his crowd — parts of which were widely known
to be violent — to Capitol Hill to intimidate Vice President Pence and Congress
into not fulfilling our constitutional duties. Those lies had consequences.
Nor did the passage of time convince Sasse to view the
stakes any differently. “I’ve got a lot of colleagues who talk a lot about
wanting to restore Article I,” he reflected on Friday, as the proceedings were
wrapping up, “and this seems to me to be the most basic opportunity to restore
some Article I prerogatives.” And yet, he lamented, “in that moment, folks are
really willing to capitulate to mere tribalism and say, well, he had the right
letter behind his name.”
When I asked whether he was worried that a conviction
might poison the Senate or divide the country further, Sasse pushed back
against the question. “Most of the people that are making what would be the
anti-conviction argument,” he told me, “are almost all making pragmatic
arguments about unity. I find them very unpersuasive so far because some of the
people making those arguments the strongest are the people who also worked
against certifying the election.”
As for the comity of the Senate? “I don’t care very much about the next 100 days,” he said, instantly. “I care about the next 100 years.”
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