A secret vote on impeachment isn’t going to happen. (And shouldn’t.)
Even if a secret impeachment vote were constitutional, the assumption that all Dems would vote for it strikes me as really shaky.
It’s bad policy in principle and bad precedent in practice, and it wouldn’t do anything to fix the rot in American politics—if it even worked, which I don’t think it would.
There would be tremendous pressure on senators to state their positions on removal publicly—ultimately, I’d expect all of them likely would.
And if all senators went on the record with their votes, do you really think twenty of them would lie? Again, there would be lots of pressure for them to vote as promised.
As a thought experiment, it’s an interesting one. But it’s not a solution to our crisis.
