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Responding to Donald Trump’s impeachment in a 14-page brief filed today, his lawyers argue that he cannot be tried by the Senate because he is no longer president and that his promotion of the baseless claim that Joe Biden stole the presidential election, which inspired hundreds of his followers to launch a deadly attack on the Capitol last month, was protected by the First Amendment. And by the way, they say, there is “insufficient evidence” to conclusively determine that Trump’s wild claims of massive election fraud were false.

The House managers charged with prosecuting Trump in the Senate preemptively rebut those arguments in an 80-page trial memorandum that was also filed today. Their case is much more thorough and, on the whole, persuasive.

Trump’s argument that the Senate is not authorized to try him focuses on the constitutional text, which says the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Constitution gives the House the “sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “the sole Power to try all Impeachments,” while limiting the penalties to “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

Those provisions do not apply to Trump, “since he is no longer ‘President,'” his lawyers say. “The constitutional provision requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached. Since the 45th President is no longer ‘President,’ the clause ‘shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for…’ is impossible for the Senate to accomplish, and thus the current proceeding before the Senate is void ab initio as a legal nullity that runs patently contrary to the plain language of the Constitution.” They also argue that “removal from office by the Senate of the President is a condition precedent which must occur before, and jointly with, ‘disqualification’ to hold future office,” meaning that a Senate trial cannot be justified by the possibility of disqualifying Trump from future federal office.

There are compelling arguments against this interpretation, based on the historical background, purposes, and prior use of the impeachment power. The House managers summarize those arguments in a 27-page section of their memorandum, noting that many legal scholars of various political persuasions think Trump is wrong on this point.

Michigan State law professor Brian Kalt gets into greater detail in his comprehensive 2001 treatment of the subject. While the record is mixed and often ambiguous, Kalt argues, the weight of the evidence supports impeachment and trial of former federal officials. Still, he calls it “a close and unsettled question.” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who is more inclined to credit Trump’s argument, likewise says the constitutionality of impeaching or trying a former president is “a close question upon which people of good faith can disagree.”

Trump’s argument that his unrelenting campaign to overturn Biden’s victory was consistent with his duties as president is much harder to take seriously. While Trump indisputably had a right to challenge the election results in court, the House managers note, the scores of lawsuits he and his allies filed were almost uniformly unsuccessful and never came close to changing the outcome. Instead of accepting the result, Trump continued to insist for months that he had actually won by a landslide, a fact he said would be apparent but for an elaborate criminal conspiracy that involved tricky election software and massive paper-ballot fraud.

“No President had ever refused to accept an election result or defied the lawful processes for resolving electoral disputes,” the House managers say. “Until President Trump.”

Some of the steps Trump took in the service of his election fantasy were by themselves clear abuses of power. The trial memorandum notes, for example, that he “tried to induce Michigan’s top Republican legislative officials to violate Michigan law by rejecting the popular vote and selecting a Trump slate of electors.” In a January 2 telephone conversation, Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to overturn Biden’s victory in that state, warning that failing to do so would be “a criminal offense” and “a big risk for you.” Trump publicly and privately urged Vice President Mike Pence to block congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory. Since that is a power the vice president does not actually have, Trump was soliciting Pence to do something illegal.

Meanwhile, Trump continued to press his doomed cause with highly inflammatory rhetoric, castigating Republicans who questioned his claims and warning that democracy would be destroyed if Biden were allowed to take office. He continued doing that even after it became clear that some of his followers were responding with death threats and violence. His campaign to overturn the election results culminated in his fiery January 6 speech to thousands of supporters who had gathered in Washington, D.C., to “stop the steal” at his behest.

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing, and stolen by the fake news media,” Trump told them. “We will never give up. We will never concede….You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

Trump made the stakes clear. “We’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there,” he said, “and our country will be destroyed. And we’re not going to stand for that.”

The House managers suggest that Trump’s speech, during which he also warned that “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore,” legally qualified as incitement to riot and exceeded the bounds of free speech as described by the Supreme Court in the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio. They also imply that the Trump’s remarks disqualified him from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which applies to federal officials who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”

All three propositions are dubious. But you need not believe them to conclude that Trump acted recklessly, without regard to the probable impact of his words, when he fired up the protesters with his apocalyptic warnings and demands for action while directing them at the Capitol, where a joint session of Congress was about to confirm the election results. Notwithstanding his suggestion that the protesters make their voices heard “peacefully,” it was entirely predictable that at least some of them would go further than that.

After the protest turned violent, Trump compounded his irresponsibility by only belatedly urging his supporters to be “peaceful,” even while reinforcing the imaginary grievance on which the rioters were acting. “At 1:49 PM, after insurrectionists had overcome the Capitol perimeter—and after reports of pipe bombs had been confirmed—President Trump retweeted a video of his speech at the rally,” the trial memorandum notes. “Just over thirty minutes later, at 2:24 PM, while rioters were still attacking police and after Vice President Pence had been evacuated from the Senate floor, President Trump again tweeted to excoriate the Vice President for refusing to obstruct the Joint Session: ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.'”

The House managers add that Trump “did not take any action at all in response to the attack until 2:38 PM, when he issued his first tweet, and 3:13 PM, when he issued a second.” The first tweet said protesters should “remain peaceful,” while the second said there should be “no violence.”

During this time, the House managers say, “not only did President Trump fail to issue unequivocal statements ordering the insurrectionists to leave the Capitol; he also failed in his duties as Commander in Chief by not immediately taking action to protect Congress and the Capitol. This failure occurred despite multiple members of Congress, from both parties, including on national television, vehemently urging President Trump to take immediate action.”

Finally, more than three hours after the riot started, Trump released a video in which he urged “peace” and told his supporters to “go home.” At the same time, he reiterated that the election was “stolen from us” after he won in “a landslide” and closed with this mixed message: “We love you, you’re very special.…I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.” That evening Trump tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Trump later told reporters his pre-riot speech was “totally appropriate.” According to his lawyers’ brief, he simply “expressed his opinion that the election results were suspect.” To the extent that the impeachment “alleges his opinion is factually in error,” they say, Trump “denies this allegation.” More generally, the brief says, Trump after the election “exercised his First Amendment right” to “express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of Covid-19 pandemic ‘safeguards,’ states’ election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures.”

That argument, which state and federal judges rejected in every case but one (involving election observers in Pennsylvania), is just a small part of the story Trump has been telling since the election. He has insisted, again and again, that Biden won only because of massive cheating on a scale never before seen in U.S. history. Neither his lawyers nor any of his allies were able to muster credible evidence to back up that tall tale. Yet his lawyers’ take is that “insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.”

Trump also avers that his statements, true or not, cannot amount to an impeachable offense because they were protected by the First Amendment. But freedom of speech “does not protect government officials from accountability for their own abuses in office,” the House managers say. “The Supreme Court has made clear that the First Amendment does not shield public officials who occupy sensitive policymaking positions from adverse actions when their speech undermines important government interests. Thus, just as a President may legitimately demand the resignation
of a Cabinet Secretary who publicly disagrees with him on a matter of policy (which President Trump did repeatedly), the public’s elected representatives may disqualify the President from federal office when they recognize that his public statements constitute a violation of his oath of office and a high crime against the constitutional order.”

George Mason law professor Ilya Somin likewise notes that “high government officials don’t have a First Amendment right to be protected from firing based on their political views.” That principle, he says, “applies to presidents facing impeachment no less than other officials.”

The House managers also address the argument that Trump’s trial will only exacerbate the bitter political divisions between his supporters and his opponents. “Many have suggested that we should turn the page on the tragic events of January 6, 2021,” they say. “But to heal the wounds he inflicted on the Nation, we must hold President Trump accountable for his conduct and, in so doing, reaffirm our core principles. Failure to convict would embolden future leaders to attempt to retain power by any and all means—and would suggest that there is no line a President cannot cross. The Senate should make clear to the American people that it stands ready to protect them against a President who provokes violence to subvert our democracy.”

Since Trump’s acquittal seems to be a foregone conclusion, I’m not sure how clear a message the trial will send on that score. But there is value in laying out the details of this shameful and horrifying episode. Even if only a handful of Republicans favor conviction, a bipartisan vote will signal that Trump did much more, and much worse, than express an opinion.

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In Montgomery County, Maryland, the public schools have remained closed since last March while many private schools have decided to open. But the county’s vaccination plan prioritizes public school teachers over employees of private schools.

“[Health officials] also will be working with our school systems, starting with the public schools, to provide opportunities for vaccination for educators and teachers,” Montgomery County Health Officer Travis Gayles said during a press conference, the Washington Examiner reported.

Gayles added that he anticipated “working with nonpublic schools” at some indeterminate point in the future. “All of those things are in the works,” he said.

The Examiner‘s Tim Carney noted that the county’s most recent vaccination guidelines allow public school staff to move to the front of the queue, but say nothing about their counterparts in private education. If this is an honest mistake, it’s one that health officials are in no hurry to clear up: The county did not immediately respond to Reason‘s request for comment.

Vaccinating teachers who are not yet back in their classrooms ahead of teachers who are actually teaching in-person makes little sense. It’s not even clear that public school teachers are receiving vaccines so that they can return to work: The Maryland State Education Association (MSEA), the state’s largest teachers union, has dismissed calls by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to reopen schools.

In a recent letter, MSEA President Cheryl Bost berated the governor for expecting union members to return to work and castigated him for suggesting that he might explore legal options to force the issue.

“I have never, in all my years, heard of a single statement uttered by a state leader that caused more tears, more anxiety, and more frustration among educators than your threat to withhold their pay and revoke their licenses at the very moments when they were working incredibly hard, as they have for months, to make the best of educating our students in impossible circumstances,” wrote Bost.

These are crocodile tears. The Maryland teachers union bosses—as well as other teachers unions across the country—have made it abundantly clear that they will fight school reopenings for as long as possible, no matter the circumstances of the pandemic. Teachers engaged in protests in Chicago, New York City, Baltimore, D.C., and elsewhere have asserted that they won’t go back to work until they feel completely safe. But we know that many schools are quite safe already—even the famously cautious Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said so.

Given that they intend to be among the last group of people to reenter the workforce, there’s an argument for deprioritizing public teachers in the vaccination queue. They certainly shouldn’t be stealing spots from private school educators.

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The numbers are in on California’s two-month regional stay-at-home order that banned outdoor dining, closed nail salons, and forbade people from socializing with others outside their household. By the state’s own estimates, the policy should be considered a costly failure.

The state’s second regional stay-at-home order was issued on December 3 by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. It divided California into five new regions and then imposed a range of new restrictions on businesses and social activity whenever spare intensive care unit (ICU) capacity fell below 15 percent.

The order provoked extreme controversy. Businesses argued a second lockdown would bring about their doom. Law enforcement agencies across the state said they wouldn’t enforce it. Several judges ruled the ban on outdoor dining was unsupported by evidence that it would slow the spread of COVID-19.

Newsom, claiming that projections showed ICU capacity would be above 15 percent within a month, issued a surprise retraction of the order at the end of January. More cynical observers, including supporters of the order, argued the governor was bowing to political pressure.

One week after its end, the Los Angeles Times reports that state officials are estimating that the stay-at-home order prevented some 25,000 people from being hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide, with the outdoor dining ban, in particular, being singled out as one main reason why.

The Times notes, as do some of the experts it quotes, that it’s much too early to have real data on the efficacy of an outdoor dining ban, but the inherent nature of eating at a restaurant—where masking is impossible and social distancing difficult—means it must have made a difference.

“A lot of people said, ‘You’re closing this down, but there’s no proof.’ Well, it’s not that there’s no proof. It’s just not the proof that people want to see,” said California’s Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly to the Times. “You have an environment where you take off your mask, and you sit close to people for a long period of time—the virus spreads.”

That is not proof that the state’s outdoor dining ban was effective. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant rejected this same argument when he struck down Los Angeles’ identical county-level ban on outdoor dining in early December.

Chalfant said in a tentative opinion that because the county could only point to generalities about the risk of outdoor dining (no masks, socializing between households etc.) but no actual proof that the practice was particularly likely to spread COVID-19, a policy singling out outdoor dining was “an abuse of the [Health] Department’s emergency powers, [and] is not grounded in science, evidence, or logic.”

But let’s assume for a moment that state estimates about the efficacy of the regional stay-at-home order are correct, and it is responsible for preventing 25,000 cases of severe COVID-19.

If that’s true, the policy should be considered ineffective compared to other means of mitigating the pandemic’s spread, and ruinously so when compared to the costs it imposed on the state’s businesses.

An average of 155,087 people were vaccinated each day over the past week in California, and 88,816 were vaccinated yesterday. The two vaccines approved for use in the U.S., made by Moderna and Pfizer, are both 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 after two doses.

According to some back-of-the-envelope math, that means that yesterday vaccinations in California prevented about three times the number of COVID-19 cases as a two-month regional stay-at-home order. On an average day, the state is preventing through vaccination six times as many COVID-19 cases as were prevented by the stay-at-home order.

One caveat to this is that most of the doses distributed on an average day in California will be a person’s first dose, and it takes two doses for the vaccine to be fully effective. Nevertheless, preliminary estimates put the effectiveness of one dose of the Pfizer vaccine at 82 percent. A single dose of the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be 92 percent effective.

Even taking the lower efficacy of one-dose vaccines into account, each day of vaccinations is preventing vastly more COVID-19 cases than the state’s regional stay-at-home order. Vaccines also don’t have the side effect of wrecking businesses, putting people out of jobs, and harming people’s ability to socialize.

One argument in favor of the governor’s now-lifted regional lockdown order is that it is still preventing some severe COVID-19 cases, and is thus worth doing, even if vaccinations are a more effective, less costly means of bringing the pandemic to an end.

But there are tradeoffs to every policy. Enforcing a stay-at-home order requires lots of time, money, and manpower to be effective. It seems the state would be much better off taking those resources spent enforcing lockdown orders and instead devoting them to speeding up the rate of vaccinations, which produce much more bang per buck.

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Anonymous sources close to the White House say the Biden administration plans to reinstate special licensing requirements for physicians to prescribe buprenorphine, the most common medication used to treat opioid use disorder. Shortly before President Donald Trump left office, his administration updated federal guidelines to discontinue the “X-waiver,” a regulation that required physicians to obtain eight hours of additional training before prescribing buprenorphine for addiction treatment. Although the Biden administration has made no official decision, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently removed the relaxed guidelines from its website.

During his campaign, President Joe Biden promised to undo regulations that prevent the optimal distribution of buprenorphine. Yet one of his first actions in office reverses a policy that would have allowed unprecedented access to opioid addiction treatment.

HHS officials cited concerns about whether the department had the authority to issue guidelines that bypassed regulations set by Congress. As recently as 2018, Congress explicitly outlined requirements that physicians and other health care providers must meet to treat opioid use disorder with buprenorphine. Although the Controlled Substances Act grants HHS broad authority, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, to reclassify any federally regulated drug, the rules imposed by Congress seem to cover all drugs in Schedules III through V. Oddly, the Justice Department might be able to avoid this obstacle by moving buprenorphine from Schedule III to the more restrictive Schedule II. Another possible option: The Biden administration could completely deschedule buprenorphine. The Trump Administration didn’t attempt either approach to justify it’s guidelines, but argued HHS has the authority to “eliminate the requirement that physicians with  a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration number apply for a separate waiver to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid use disorder treatment,” which would effectively cover almost all practicing physicians in the U.S.

Legal issues aside, evidence from abroad suggests that physician licensing for buprenorphine prescribing might be preventing the U.S. from better addressing unprecedented levels of opioid-related deaths (mostly involving illicit fentanyl) amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the previous assistant HHS secretary, Elinore McCance-Katz, warns that loosening buprenorphine restrictions could lead to black-market diversion through overprescribing, France witnessed a 79 percent drop in opioid-related deaths within four years of eliminating its physician-licensing requirement for buprenorphine in 1995. During this period, the number of patients receiving medication-assisted treatment (MAT) with opioids like buprenorphine increased from fewer than 2,000 to more than 60,000. Evidence from the U.S. also suggests that buprenorphine distribution is followed by substantial reductions in opioid-related fatalities.

As of March 2020, 1.3 million Americans were receiving MAT for opioid addiction. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) indicate that 1.6 million Americans experienced opioid use disorder in 2019. That gap may help explain why 90 percent of illicit buprenorphine users report obtaining the drug to prevent opioid withdrawal. In addition to estimating the number of Americans who qualified for a diagnosis of opioid use disorder, the 2019 NSDUH found that more than 10 million Americans used illegal opioids or “misused” prescription analgesics that year. 

The idea behind MAT is to replace euphoric opioids such as heroin, fentanyl, and oxycodone with a milder opioid that relieves cravings and other withdrawal symptoms. Many public health officials would prefer that opioid users become completely abstinent and see MAT as, at best, a step toward that goal. Yet the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has acknowledged the need for MAT medicines like buprenorphine and methadone to fight the worsening scourge of opioid-related deaths. The DEA even supported relaxing telemedicine restrictions to ensure access to buprenorphine during the pandemic. Since only 8 percent of illicit buprenorphine users report that they use the drug to get “high,” the Biden administration should consider reposting the previous administration’s guidelines, which would allow more doctors to help patients struggling with opioid addiction.

Buprenorphine is a Schedule III substance, which means it is deemed to have a lower “potential for abuse” than the opioids in Schedule II, which include morphine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone. Yet all physicians seeking to prescribe opioids for addiction treatment must acquire additional medical training and can treat no more than 100 patients in the first year and no more than 275 after that. Those restrictions are puzzling, because there is no patient cap or additional training requirement for prescribing Schedule II opioids, or even buprenorphine, for pain relief. Until recently, the DEA was much more likely to audit prescribers of buprenorphine than prescribers of oxycodone.

“Regardless of how it’s done, it’s important to end the X-waiver,” says Kate Nicolson, a civil and disability rights lawyer who founded the National Pain Advocacy Center. “If HHS doesn’t have the authority, an amendment can be easily added to pending opioid crisis legislation….There is a clear evidence basis that buprenorphine reduces the chance that those suffering from opioid use disorder die from an overdose, and the additional regulations surrounding the drug are simply a double standard steeped in stigma against drug users. Such restrictions don’t yet affect pain patients receiving the same drug, although that is starting to change with new regulations. We need to reassess whether the interventions we’ve put forward have led to more deaths and focus on appropriately prescribing all opioid medications.”

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This morning, both the House impeachment managers and Donald Trump’s defense lawyers filed their respective trial briefs. The House brief is available here, and the defense brief here.

The House brief is an impressive and thorough analysis of both the facts leading up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the various legal issues involved. On the former, it is worth emphasizing, as the brief does that the relevant evidence includes not just Trump’s January 6 speech to the crowd that later attacked the Capitol, but his previous history of making bogus accusations of election fraud and condoning violence by his supporters. It is the combination of all three which makes Trump culpable, and which led some of his supporters to reasonably assume that he wanted them to attack the Capitol. As the brief notes, many of the Capitol rioters have explicitly said they did what they did because that’s what they thought that’s what Trump wanted.

The House brief also effectively addresses both of the major legal defenses offered by Trump’s supporters: that a conviction would undermine freedom of speech, and that it is unconstitutional to try a former president. I have previously written about both issues at length (e.g., here, here, and here), and won’t go over them in detail in this post. To my mind, the best short analyses of these two issues are by my Volokh Conspiracy co-blogger Keith Whittington (see here and here). Keith’s writings are—deservedly—cited repeatedly in the House brief (which also includes some citations to writings by other VC writers, including a couple of my own posts).

By contrast with the House brief, the defense brief is short and mostly consists of assertions unsupported by either evidence or or legal argument. These flaws may reflect the fact that Trump’s current lawyers only took over the case yesterday, after he parted ways with his original legal team over the weekend.

The brief contains a few notable whoppers, such as the claim that “[i]nsufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements [about the election results] were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.” This simply ignores the overwhelming evidence of rulings by numerous courts rejecting Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud, including ones authored by judges Trump himself appointed (a fact effectively summarized in the House brief).

The defense brief predictably raises both the free speech defense, and the claim that impeaching a former president is unconstitutional. But it fails to address any of the numerous flaws in these arguments pointed out by a variety of legal commentators across the political spectrum—and duly summarized in the House brief.

Trump’s lawyers’ brief also contends that the impeachment is unconstitutional because it is a “bill of attainder” (a law targeting a specific individual  for punishment). I will mostly leave this issue to those with greater relevant expertise. But I will point out that there can be no bill of attainder without punishment (usually for some sort of crime). Impeachment  and conviction inflicts no punishment, and does not deprive the target of life, liberty, or property. It is instead a mechanism for protecting the constitutional system against threats, by removing dangerous officials from office, and (as in this case) potentially barring them from holding office again in the future.

If this impeachment qualifies as a bill of attainder, the same would be true of virtually any other impeachment. After all, almost all impeachments target specific individuals. Removing or barring specific individuals is the whole point of the impeachment process.

Perhaps the best argument in the defense brief is the claim that the Impeachment Article combines several different issues into one charge, in the hope  of assembling the required two-thirds supermajority to convict, from senators who may not fully agree with the charge, but do agree with parts.

I think it might have been better to include a separate count for Trump’s earlier efforts to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State into illegally overturning the election results in his state. But I don’t believe this issue should be a deal-breaker for conviction. Senators can conclude Trump is guilty of inciting the insurrection even if they don’t agree with all of the reasoning in the Article. Unlike in a criminal trial, which will often properly focus on technical details of specific charges, an impeachment vote is not a narrow legalistic process, but rather should be focused on the bottom line of whether defendant’s actions justify removal from office (in the case of a sitting official) or being barred from future office-holding.

While the House brief is clearly superior to the crude and superficial work product of the defense team, I am not naive enough to think that this will make a major difference to the outcome. Impeachment is at least as much a political process as it is a legal one, probably more so. That’s why Mitt Romney (in Trump’s first impeachment trial) is the only senator to have ever voted to convict a president of his own party. Trump’s second impeachment trial will almost certainly add to the count. But partisan bias—combined with GOP senators’ fear of retribution by Trump’s supporters within the party—seems likely to save Trump from conviction by the required 2/3 majority.

I don’t doubt, by the way, that partisan bias plays a role on the Democratic side, as well. Few politicians are immune to it. But it is notable that the Trump impeachment has gained greater bipartisan support than any other impeachment of a president (with the possible exception of the potential impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974), and that it has been backed by numerous right-of-center legal scholars and other commentators who have little, if any, love for the Democratic Party.

At this point, there seems little likelihood of a conviction, as 45 GOP senators recently voted against tabling a motion to reject Sen. Rand Paul’s objection to the impeachment trial based on the claim that former presidents cannot be tried after they leave office. But some of those senators have indicated they are leaving their options open when it comes to the final verdict—including, significantly—minority leader Mitch McConnell. Only time will tell how many senators will vote to convict, though it is highly doubtful it will be enough to reach the necessary two-thirds majority.

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