The Senate voted largely along party lines — 51 to 49 — to not seek witnesses or further documents in President Trump’s impeachment trial, setting the stage for a vote to acquit the commander in chief. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah were the only two Republicans joining all Democrats in...

The impeachment trial of President Trump has effectively come to an end.After several hours of arguments over the issue, the Senate voted 51-49 against a motion to bring witnesses in Trump's impeachment trial. Two Republicans joined every Democrat and Independent to support the motion, but it failed to garner the support it needed and spelled the end of arguments in the trial.Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) were the two senators who voted in favor of the bill. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), once expected to perhaps support bringing witnesses, announced earlier they'd be voting against the measure.The call for bringing witnesses in the Senate trial got a renewed push earlier this week when a reported clip from former National Security Adviser John Bolton's forthcoming book revealed Trump had talked with him about a quid pro quo with Ukraine. Bolton said he'd be willing to testify for the Senate, and ex-Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas also repeatedly pushed for himself to be called as a witness.Following the vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sent the Senate into recess, perhaps for the rest of Friday night.More stories from theweek.com Mitch McConnell's rare blunder John Bolton just vindicated Nancy Pelosi All the president's turncoats

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is running for reelection in Kentucky. So why is he running TV ads in Florida?

Like most everything in Republican politics, the answer has to do with one person: President Donald Trump.

With Trump planning to go to his Mar-a-Lago club for Super Bowl weekend, Massie, a four-term Kentucky congressman, is purchasing TV advertising time in South Florida on the president’s favorite channel, Fox News. Massie’s goal: Communicate to the president that his Republican primary challenger, attorney Todd McMurtry, is a “Trump hater.”

The libertarian-minded Massie has broken with Trump on an array of key issues, which McMurtry has highlighted repeatedly since launching his campaign earlier this month. But Massie’s new commercial aims to turn the tables on McMurtry, who is branding himself as a staunch Trump ally in lockstep with the president ahead of the May 19 primary.

“He’s even worse than a Never Trumper. Todd McMurtry is a Trump hater,” says the ad, which opens with a photograph of Massie and Trump flashing grins and thumbs-ups.

Massie’s commercial then highlights a handful of critical comments McMurtry made about Trump on Facebook, mostly in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency.

“Sad but true. Trump is the epitome of a weak male,” said one McMurtry post, read in classic attack-ad fashion by the narrator.

“Trump is an idiot,” says another.

“Hillary is right,” McMurtry writes in another comment. “He is temperamentally unqualified to be president.”

Massie’s commercial concludes by tying his primary opponent to Hillary Clinton: “Siding with ‘Crooked Hillary.’ That’s Todd McMurtry, the Trump hater.”

The race in Kentucky’s deeply conservative 4th Congressional District, which spans the northernmost part of the state, underscores how GOP primaries are becoming litmus tests for fealty to Trump. Republican contests in areas from the Philadelphia suburbs to Fort Worth, Texas, are hinging on a simple factor: whether an incumbent House Republican has been sufficiently supportive of the president.

The significance of this test became clear during the 2018 primary season. Former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost reelection to a challenger who highlighted his denunciations of the president. Two other Trump critics, Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, retired rather than face primary challenges from Trump-aligned opponents when their poll numbers sagged after blowups with Trump.

That has led a small group of Republicans, which now includes Massie, to go to great and unusual lengths to dissuade the president from endorsing a primary opponent. Alabama Rep. Martha Roby withdrew her support for Trump after the release of the lewd “Access Hollywood” tape just prior to the 2016 election, prompting a furious response from local Republicans. So once Trump took office, Roby became a frequent visitor at the White House in hopes of smoothing over her relationship with the president. At the time, Roby was trying to fend off a primary threat from a pro-Trump opponent. She won reelection in 2018 but is retiring in 2020.

Massie’s ad cuts into the main point of his opponent’s campaign. McMurtry, one of the attorneys who represented Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann in his defamation lawsuit against several media outlets, has pointed out that Massie’s voting record is less aligned with Trump less than any other member of the Kentucky congressional delegation, saying that Trump can’t “rely on our congressman’s support.”

Running in a district that Trump won by more than 35 percentage points, McMurtry has vowed there will be no daylight between him and the president. Earlier this month, he tweeted out a picture of the Trump Hotel in Washington.

“Hoping to see my favorite President,” McMurtry wrote.

It’s not the first time a candidate has bought advertising time in South Florida hoping to get the president’s attention. Shortly after launching his Democratic presidential campaign last fall, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg ran TV commercials in the area, coinciding with the president’s holiday travel to Mar-a-Lago.

And Massie’s campaign is making no secret of its intended audience.

“We know the president will be in Florida this weekend, and we want him to know that our primary opponent has not been a supporter of his,” said Massie campaign manager Jonathan Van Norman.

The Massie campaign is spending around $3,000 to air the commercial during Fox News programs this weekend in the West Palm Beach area, including “Fox News Sunday.” The spot is expected to air more than 50 times on Fox News over a 36-hour period.

The campaign will also spend $13,000 to run the ad on Fox News in Kentucky from Feb. 1 through Feb. 10.

The McMurtry campaign responded to the ad by pointing to several pieces of legislation and recent votes on which Massie broke with Trump, including a resolution aimed at curtailing the president’s ability to wage war with Iran.

“Every time President Trump needs him, Massie stabs him in the back,” McMurty campaign manager Jake Monssen said. “It would be great if Thomas Massie’s problem was limited to old Facebook posts. It’s not. His problem is his anti-Trump voting record in the House.”

While Trump has endorsed several House Republicans who are trying to fight off primaries, aides to the president say he is unlikely to intervene in the Kentucky contest — either for or against Massie. While they acknowledge Massie has sometimes opposed the president, they also note that he voted against impeachment in the House.

That has not kept Massie, who is facing the most serious reelection threat of his congressional career, from pursuing a presidential endorsement. Van Norman said the reelection campaign had been seeking Trump’s support.

“Certainly,” Van Norman said, “Congressman Massie would welcome an endorsement from President Trump in his race.”

Republican senators shut down calls Friday to hear witnesses against President Trump, matching Democrats' "half-baked, slapdash" impeachment in the House with the most abbreviated trial in Senate history.

GOP lawmakers said it wasn't their job to rescue Democrats from their own partisan bungles, rejecting a steady stream of "bombshell" reports ...

The Iowa caucuses are almost here. Voters will have a chance to express their preferences among the Democratic presidential candidates on Monday after months of campaigning, advertisements and televised town halls and debates. While Iowa alone will not determine the party's nominee, it will mark the official start of the campaign season.

After a ten-day trial packed with appeals from Democrats, counter-arguments from the White House and a few fresh revelations about President Trump’s conduct, the Senate voted against considering any new evidence in the impeachment trial, clearing the only real obstacle to a speedy acquittal of the president.On Friday, 49 senators—all 47 Democrats and two Republicans—voted in favor of a motion that would have allowed the chamber to subpoena additional documents and witnesses pertaining to Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Fifty-one Republicans voted against it. The Democrats prosecuting the case against Trump had argued that the most important vote for senators would not be the one to acquit or convict the president but the one to allow additional discovery. Airing new testimony was unlikely to ever change the odds of a vote to convict Trump in the GOP-held Senate, but it would have filled out the missing pieces of what transpired in the president’s attempt to get Ukrainian officials to launch investigations into his political rivals. It also would have maximized political pain on GOP senators’ votes to acquit Trump and possibly boosted Democrats’ plans to retake the Senate majority. The Secret Reason Republicans Won’t Impeach TrumpThe Senate Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), said in a Friday morning press conference that “if my Republican colleagues refuse to even consider witnesses and documents in this trial, this country is headed towards the greatest cover up since Watergate.”With the central drama of the trial already resolved, the only real question remaining is if any senators will cross party lines in the final votes on articles of impeachment. Some Republicans had hoped that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would move immediately to that vote. Instead, however, the Senate will likely take a few more days to hear closing arguments and allow senators to explain their votes in floor speeches, setting up an end to the trial early next week. A string of recent stories in The New York Times reporting that ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton had written in his forthcoming book confirmations of Trump seeking a quid-pro-quo arrangement with Ukraine rocked the Senate trial. And, for a moment, it seemed to disrupt the carefully plotted course that McConnell had in mind. A third story, coming just hours before the witness vote, reported that Bolton had written that Trump directed him to help with his Ukraine pressure campaign, and that top White House officials had witnessed the ask. That reporting was addressed repeatedly by House impeachment managers in their closing argument for witnesses on Friday. But Republicans remained unmoved, including those who had been considered possible votes to hear more evidence. One of them, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), pointed to the likelihood of acquittal as a major reason to not prolong the trial any further.“Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout, I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate,” she said. “I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Before the vote, there had been a heated debate among senators on whether to call witnesses, making it perhaps the most divisive issue of the trial.

Senate Republicans rejected a mid-trial effort to call witnesses and documents on Friday, paving the way for President Trump’s acquittal on two articles of impeachment passed by the House.Senators voted 49-51, with Republican Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah...