WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell holds the title of Republican leader.
But it’s Kentucky’s junior senator who is attempting to steer the GOP caucus out of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, providing an array of arguments that will likely usher them toward an acquittal of the former president as soon as this weekend.
Rand Paul’s preemptive constitutional challenge to the trial became the initial guiding light for Republicans looking for cover. As the trial bends to a close, he’s one of the few participants taking on the House Democratic impeachment managers in personal terms, charging them with hypocrisy.
This, all while McConnell stays mostly quiet, having deliberated privately whether this process could help disentangle his party from a former president who he sees as a political albatross.
McConnell may still be the strategic brain of the GOP, but Paul is showing he’s much closer to where its heart beats.
“They are a Senate pairing of the old and the new GOP. Rand’s own primary fight a decade ago represented the beginning of the end of institutional power. McConnell has been trying to manage that dynamic — sometimes with success, sometimes not — ever since,” said Dan Bayens, a Lexington-based Republican media consultant who has worked for Paul. “It’s safe to say that McConnell is torn, which is something you just don’t see from him.”
The void left by McConnell, who usually imposes fierce discipline over his caucus, created the opening for the second-term Paul, who is up for re-election next year.
They are a Senate pairing of the old and the new GOP. It’s safe to say that McConnell is torn, which something you just don’t see from him.Dan Bayens, Republican media consultant
Once the U.S. House impeached Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, Paul began considering the cleanest, most cogent defense to deploy. He mulled over focusing his challenge on the absence of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who would usually preside over such a trial but chose not to without explanation. He thought about calling for a boycott of the trial altogether, potentially leaving House impeachment managers presenting their case to many more empty chairs.
But on Jan. 25, after huddling with a small group of aides and reading the scholarship of Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz — a Trump attorney during the first impeachment trial — Paul settled on the constitutional point of order as the smartest play to set the terms of the debate. Private citizens shouldn’t be eligible for impeachment from an office they no longer hold, he reasoned.
Paul’s team informed McConnell’s office ahead of their move, according to a Paul aide. And while McConnell’s team wasn’t thrilled by Paul’s timing, there wasn’t much they could do to stop him. A McConnell aide did not dispute this account.
But McConnell ended up siding with Paul and 43 other Republicans to form the position that senators continued to cite this week, even as a deluge of compelling visual evidence of the horrors of Jan. 6 spilled into their chamber.
Yes, the riot was unprecedented, gut-wrenching and ghastly, admitted Republican senators, but that wasn’t enough to trigger a conviction on the charge of incitement.
“We want justice. But that doesn’t mean that we can go against what we believe to be constitutionally limited authority,” Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota told reporters.
“It should go to the courts, not to Congress where we don’t have a sitting president,” said Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, also citing the constitutionality argument.
