Thread by @MesMitch

House speaker Nancy Pelosi injected added uncertainty to the process on the night of Trump’s impeachment, by saying the House would wait to refer articles of impeachment to the Senate until the terms of the Senate trial were made clear.

McConnell “says it’s OK for the foreman of the jury to be in cahoots with the lawyers of the accused,” Pelosi said. “That doesn’t sound right to us.”

The flagrant advertising by McConnell and colleagues such as Lindsey Graham – “I’m not trying to pretend to be

a fair juror here,” Graham has said – of their intention to acquit Trump is “utterly inappropriate” and “shocking”, said Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and bestselling author of One Nation After Trump.

“Imagine if somebody’s up on a murder trial, and it turns out that the foreman of the jury has worked with the defense team before the trial started to make sure that the outcome was just what they wanted,” Ornstein said. “We would view it as outrageous.”

The peril, for Republicans, lies in a potential political price to be paid for seeming too dismissive of the allegations against Trump – and in the possibility that a small, renegade faction of four Republican senators could decide

to hobble McConnell, if the majority leader is seen as moving too dismissively.

While such a breakaway faction of elected Republicans has yet to materialize on any Trump-related question, there remains the possibility that Republican senators who

are either relatively free from Trump’s political power – Mitt Romney of Utah – or senators facing difficult re-election bids in 2020 – Susan Collins of Maine; Cory Gardner of Colorado; Dan Sullivan of Alaska; Joni Ernst of Iowa; Martha McSally of Arizona – could congeal to form

some sort of temporary resistance.

“You have four, five, six Senate Republicans up in 2020 who are going to have to answer for those votes,” said Ornstein. “So this is frankly pretty tricky business.”

Williams said: “It’s hard to know how vulnerable Republican senators might act, given that for three years, we’ve heard maddening stories about how in private, Republican senators seem to be quite concerned about the president’s conduct – but they simply refuse to

engage in their constitutional duties and hold the president accountable.”

Roberts is another wild card. The two chief justices to have previously presided at Senate impeachment trials – William Rehnquist in 1999 and Salmon Chase in 1868 – left two opposing models for the role,

said Hurd, with Chase treating the Senate like a courtroom in which he ruled frequently, and Rehnquist treating it like a political theater in which he played a limited role.

“Roberts is obviously Rehnquist’s protegé,” said Hurd.

“How he decides to approach this is anybody’s guess, and I imagine this is going to have a huge effect on how the different strategies will work themselves out.”

What’s at stake in the Senate goes beyond the political fate of any member of Congress, Williams said.

“The core question here is what standard do we want to set for future presidents,” said Williams. “If we accept that future presidents can invite foreign meddling in our elections, then senators are free to condone that.

“That would be a very sad day for American democracy.”