Trump is embroiled in legal battles that could have far-reaching consequences for the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.

The U.S. Senate has made its judgment in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, acquitting the president. Fifty two of 53 senators in the Republican majority voted to acquit the president on the abuse of power charge and all 53 Republican senators voted to acquit on the obstruction of Congress charge. All 47 Democratic senators voted to convict the president on both charges. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the only Republican voting to convict for abuse of power.The Republican senators’ speedy exoneration of Trump marks perhaps the most dramatic step in their capitulation to the president over the past three years. That process, as I wrote in The Conversation last fall, recalls the ancient Roman senate’s compliance with the autocratic rule of the emperors and its transformation into a body largely reliant on the emperors’ whims.Along with the senatorial fealty that was again on display, there was another development that links the era of the Roman Republic’s transformation into an autocratic state with the ongoing political developments in the United States. It’s a development that may point to where the country is headed. Leader is the stateTrump’s lawyers argued that the president’s personal position is inseparable from that of the nation itself. This is similar to the notion that took hold during the ascendancy of the man known as Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who was in power from 31 B.C. to A.D. 14.Trump defense attorney Alan Dershowitz asserted that “abuse of power” by the president is not an impeachable offense. A central part of Dershowitz’s argument was that “every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest” and that “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”This inability to separate the personal interests of a leader from the interests of the country he or she leads has powerful echoes in ancient Rome. There, no formal change from a republican system to an autocratic system ever occurred. Rather, there was an erosion of the republican institutions, a steady creep over decades of authoritarian decision-making, and the consolidation of power within one individual – all with the name “Republic” preserved. Oversight becomes harassmentMuch of Rome’s decline into one-man rule can be observed in a series of developments during the time of Augustus, who held no formal monarchical title but only the vague designation “princeps,” or “first among equals.” But in fact the senate had ceded him both power (“imperium” in Latin) over Rome’s military and the traditional tribune’s power to veto legislation. Each of these powers also granted him immunity from prosecution. He was above the law.Augustus’ position thus gave him exactly the freedom from oversight – or what Trump calls “presidential harassment” – that the president demands. Such immunity is also the sort that Richard Nixon seemed to long for, most famously in his post-presidency declaration that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” In Augustus’ time the idea also emerged that the “princeps” and the Roman state were to a great extent one and the same. The identity of the one was growing to become inseparable from the identity of the other.So, for example, under Augustus and then his successor Tiberius, insults against the emperor could be considered acts of treason against the state, or, more officially, against “the majesty of the Roman people.” A critic of the “princeps” – be it in unflattering words or in the improper treatment of his image – was subject to prosecution as an “enemy of the people.”A physical demonstration of the emerging union of the “princeps” and the state came in the construction of a Temple of Roma and Augustus in cities across the Mediterranean region.Here the personification of the state as a goddess, Roma, and the “princeps” Augustus were closely aligned and, what is more, deified together. The message communicated by such a pairing was clear: If not quite one and the same, the “princeps” and the state were intimately identified, possessing a special, abiding authority through their union.Many higher-ups in the Trump administration, from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have spoken publicly of Trump as a divinely chosen figure. And Trump himself declared earlier this year, “I do really believe we have God on our side.”To this point, however, a Temple of Lady Liberty and Trump along the lines of the Temple of Roma and Augustus has not yet been constructed. But the Senate impeachment trial has shown us how far along the identification of leader and state has moved in the Trump era. A central part of the president’s impeachment defense is, as we have seen, that the personal will of the president is indistinguishable from the will of the state and the good of the people. Will the GOP-led Senate’s endorsement of this defense clear a path for more of the manifestations – and consequences – of authoritarianism? The case of the Roman Republic’s rapid slippage into an autocratic regime masquerading as a republic shows how easily that transformation can occur.[ Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter. ]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Canada-U.K. free trade: A post-Brexit opportunity * Civility in politics is harder than you thinkTimothy Joseph does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial ended on Wednesday with a conclusion that was unsurprising – his acquittal. Opinion polls during the impeachment proceedings suggested little political harm to Trump - opinions among Republicans and Democrats were largely entrenched from the outset. November is also when Republican Party lawmakers in the U.S. Congress, especially those in districts and states that are a toss-up, may learn the political costs of erecting a human wall to block efforts to remove Trump from the Oval Office.

President Donald Trump was gone, the House lights were dimming, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looked up to her friends and family in the gallery overhead. The moment showcased Pelosi's sharper, less-restrained approach to the nation's 45th president at the bitter end of the impeachment saga she led.

More than 200 "Reject the Cover-Up" protests, as they're called, are scheduled to take place at 5:30 p.m. EST in opposition to the expected acquittal.

A Democratic victory on election day should free us from the chaos of the Trump presidency. But that is far from guaranteedBy all measures, the president was a malicious demagogue with a “taste for public performance”, reviled for his “swaggering vanity”. Many considered him incompetent and unfit for office; some called him mad. He impugned the character of the country’s most famous war hero but was, himself, “exquisitely sensitive to slights, real or perceived”. He inflamed racial tensions and embraced the cause of white supremacists. He liked to “humiliate, harass, and hound” his enemies, real and imagined. Heedless of consequences, he “baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people”. A leading senator lamented that “he has introduced the most fearful system of corruption and demoralization into any government in modern history”. The hostilities between Congress and the president became so great that impeachment was all but inevitable.Sound familiar? Yet much as this may sound like a portrait of the current inhabitant of the White House, it is in fact Brenda Wineapple’s description of Andrew Johnson in her immensely readable book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Johnson, as we recall, was the first president in American history to be impeached, and like Donald Trump survived removal by the Senate – in Johnson’s case, by a single vote.Many contemporaneous lawmakers and observers considered the Senate’s failure to convict a disaster, a dreadful misstep that left a vindictive, divisive and intemperate man in power. And yet as Wineapple makes clear, even if the effort to remove Johnson did not succeed, it also wasn’t the failure it was immediately perceived to be. In fact, the impeachment left Johnson badly weakened, “reduced … to a shadow”. He could not even secure his party’s nomination in 1868, and was out of office the next year.> Mitch McConnell and his minions have essentially given the president carte blanche to ignore constitutional normsAlas, it’s hard to imagine Trump’s impeachment as having any such positive upside. We can safely assume that far from chastened by his brush with removal, Trump will be only more brazen in his demagoguery and authoritarianism. And why not? Mitch McConnell and his minions have essentially given the president carte blanche to ignore constitutional norms, signing off not only on his effort to solicit foreign meddling in the 2020 election, but more disturbingly on his unprecedented stonewalling of Congress’s oversight powers. The framers of the constitution created the impeachment process as a critical bulwark against executive malfeasance; Senate Republicans have now in effect removed that bulwark.Which turns all our attention to 3 November 2020 – election day. For those who questioned the tactical wisdom – though not the propriety or even the necessity – of impeaching the president, focusing on 2020 was always the better way to go. At issue on that day will not be whether Trump committed high crimes or misdemeanors but whether he has earned another term as the nation’s chief executive. Republican lawmakers cannot accuse Democrats of trying to defeat the will of the people if the people vote Trump out of the White House.That, at least, is the hope. And yet the belief that defeating Trump in 2020 provides a tamper-proof method of removing him from office is to miss the singular menace that this president represents to a basic principle of democratic governance: the peaceful succession of power. Here my concern is not that Trump might try to steal the 2020 election through disinformation, foreign interference and voter suppression, real as those concerns are.Rather my concern is different: what if Trump loses in 2020 election but the result is exceptionally close, turning on the outcome in a handful of swing states? In 2016, Trump essentially announced that he would not accept any outcome short of victory. The fact that Trump’s acquittal in the Senate should come fast on the heels of a major app malfunction in Iowa highlights the gravity of threat we face this coming November.Imagine, then, how Trump would spin even the most innocent software glitch in 2020, should he lose: he will unleash a Twitter storm, working to cast any acts of incompetence and confusion at the polls as signs of a grand, organized conspiracy to finish the work that Nancy Pelosi started. In this, he will find support from his megaphones in the rightwing media. And the Senate trial makes clear that far from opposing Trump’s refusal to accept electoral defeat, Republican lawmakers will eagerly abet the president’s attack. Come 3 November, a slender victory by the Democratic challenger will not free us from the chaos of this presidency. Trump will not go quietly. He might not go at all. * Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College and a contributing opinion writer for Guardian US. His newest book, Will He Go? Trump and Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, will appear in May

In a hyperpartisan era, Republicans cast Trump as a victim while Democrats lamented his ‘normalisation of lawlessness’Donald Trump’s short but indelible political career has been based around the principle of divide-and-fool. His acquittal in the impeachment trial by the US Senate will further fan the flames of the most profound national split since the Vietnam war, perhaps even the civil war.First, expect Trump to be cocky and take a victory lap, falsely claiming “exoneration” just as he did after special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation left him bruised but unbowed. A day after Mueller’s leaden testimony to Congress, the president felt able to act with such impunity that he made his bullying phone call to the leader of Ukraine.Now, we must ask, who will he call a day after being cleared by the Senate?Admirers of the US president will take heart that a man many imbue with folk-hero status, who gives them long yearned-for “payback” against a perceived cultural, economic and social elite, has survived yet again. They share his view that he was the victim of “a coup” and embrace his sense of grievance and resentment. Trump supporters interviewed by the Guardian at his recent campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, put it down to the latest machinations of corrupt politicians in Washington.On the other side, feelings run equally high. Democrats and other critics of the president argue, correctly, that in strong-arming Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Trump abused his office for personal political gain and has been allowed to get away with it through a miscarriage of justice. He is, they have said, a president who would be king, undermining rule of law and threatening the very fabric of democracy in America – and around the world.Adam Schiff, the House impeachment manager who led the case against Trump in the Senate, spoke last week of a descent into “constitutional madness” as spineless Republican senators huddle behind Richard Nixon’s notorious defence of his conduct in the Watergate scandal: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”Schiff told the chamber: “Watergate is now 40, 50 years behind us. Have we learned nothing in the last half-century? Have we learned nothing at all? We are right back to where we were a half-century ago, and we may even be in a worse place because this time that argument may succeed.“That is the normalisation of lawlessness.”Comparisons to Watergate are illustrative. The House of Representatives voted 410-to-4 to authorise a formal impeachment inquiry against Richard Nixon in 1974, whereas no House Republicans voted for the Trump impeachment inquiry or for his actual impeachment (Nixon resigned before the sanction could be applied).John Zogby, a political pollster, noted recently: “The key reason why Nixon resigned was that his polls were at 23%. And there was a famous walk from the Capitol to the White House, where three Republican congressional leaders walked to the White House and said to Mr Nixon, ‘You’re hurting the political party. You’re hurting the Republicans. You have to go.’“In fact, when Nixon resigned, he said: “It’s clear that I’ve lost my political base. He did not apologise for anything that he was investigated on.”Trump’s approval rating, by contrast, now stands at 49% in the latest Gallup poll – the highest since he took office and better than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama at this stage in their re-election years. Somehow he is becoming stronger rather than weaker.A Washington Post column noted five key differences between Nixon and Trump: the current president has a stronger economy, a more loyal Senate, does not face the kind of “smoking gun” tapes that Nixon did, a White House willing to stonewall on his behalf and, perhaps most importantly, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is on his side.Fox’s chief pro-Trump tribune, Sean Hannity, has been savaging the trial nightly. The articles of impeachment “are an affront to our entire constitutional system”, he raged. “No Republican senator – listen, voters out there, you elect these people – should give this one iota of legitimacy.”Supposedly a 24-hour news network, Fox News has not even shown important chunks of the proceedings: it did not broadcast Schiff’s closing argument. Meanwhile, over on the MSNBC network, there is constant analysis of how a dangerous demagogue poses an existential threat to the constitution.A report by the Pew Research Center found that among Democrats and those sympathetic to the party, 67% trust CNN, 61% trust NBC and 60% trust ABC, whereas 65% of Republicans and those leaning toward it trust Fox News. “It would be hard to overstate its connection as a trusted go-to source of political news for Republicans,” Pew said.And it warned: “As the US enters a heated 2020 presidential election year … Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments.”Indeed, social media exacerbating the trends, this is going to get worse before it gets better. Polarisation is both symptom and cause, the condition that made Trump’s ascent possible, but which he then exploits and entrenches in an endless and increasingly unbreakable cycle.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, offered a brilliant summary. “This trial in so many ways crystallised the completely diametrically opposed threats that Democrats and Republicans see to the country,” he told the New York Times. “We perceive Donald Trump and his corruption to be an existential threat to the country. They perceive the deep state and the liberal media to be an existential threat to the country.“That dichotomy, that contrast, has been growing over the last three years, but this trial really crystallised that difference. We were just speaking different languages, fundamentally different languages when it came to what this trial was about. They thought it was about the deep state and the media conspiracy. We thought it was about the president’s crimes.”Each side therefore regards November’s election as a struggle between right and wrong with the prospect of defeat a cause for panic. Trump’s acquittal will become the latest tool in his kit for polarising the country and firing up his base, joining race, abortion rights, the climate crisis, supreme court justices, dark warnings against “socialism” and a host of other wedge issues. That instinct was on full display in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address, where the emboldened president goaded his opponents with flourishes worthy of reality TV as Republicans chanted “Four more years!”As the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, theatrically tore up Trump’s speech, it was a reminder that Democrats will fight fire with fire and have a base of their own to energise. Even supposed moderate candidates such as former vice-president Joe Biden and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg are significantly to the left of Barack Obama on issues such as climate and immigration. These are dark days for technocratic centrism and the “third way”.If the presidential election were decided by simple popular vote totals, it would be all over, bar the shouting. Indeed, Trump would have been beaten soundly by Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the quirks of the electoral college mean that many observers have a gut feeling he can pull it off again in key midwestern states.If he does not, there are some who worry that he will simply refuse to accept the result, returning to old lies he propagated in 2016 about illegal voting. Will Republicans dare to slap down this modern Caesar and remind him of the rule of law?In this hyperpartisan era, it no longer seems a safe bet. A constitutional crisis over the election result would make even the impeachment trial look like child’s play.Historian Niall Ferguson wrote the book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire in 2004. The American empire, economically and militarily powerful and newly strong rich in oil and gas, is far from fallen. But to future historians, the impeachment “trial” offers a glimpse of what an imploding empire might look like.

Republicans are reportedly plotting a way to expunge Donald Trump’s impeachment should they regain control of the House of Representatives in 2020.The idea comes on the heels of a months long process that Democrats began last year in the House, and has now led to the acquittal of Mr Trump after he became the third president to be impeached in US history.

During the last four months, congressional Democrats pored over thousands of pages of evidence, listened to dozens of hours of testimony and compiled a 300-page report outlining how President Donald J. Trump abused his office when he withheld Ukraine’s military aid in exchange for politically-motivated investigations into Democratic opponents.Through it all, Trump appeared defiant, even calm, in the face of one of the most significant U.S. political storms in modern history. The phone call was “perfect”; the motivations pure; the investigation into it merely a partisan witch hunt designed to overturn an election that Democrats still couldn’t stomach.On Wednesday, the president’s defiance paid off. Despite several Republican Senators conceding that House Democrats had proved the case that Trump had abused his office, all but one, Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to acquit him on grounds of abusing his office and obstructing Congress. The two articles of impeachment failed to pass the Senate, the first by a vote of 48 to 52 the latter by a vote of 47 to 53. All Democrats voted to convict on each count. Romney only voted to convict on the abuse of power article.  The tally was just the latest illustration of the degree to which the president has become the political commodity that the Republican Party seems most keen on protecting. Indeed, the loyalty exhibited by Republicans on Capitol Hill during the course of the trial often left Democrats despondent, wondering what else they could have possibly done to prove that Trump deserved to be removed from office. Mitt Romney Will Vote to Convict Trump: ‘Appalling Abuse of Public Trust’For President Trump, Wednesday’s acquittal will almost certainly framed as a complete vindication—an outcome long feared by senior Democratic leaders who, for months, questioned behind closed doors whether impeachment proceedings would backfire in the long run. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew ire from fellow House lawmakers when she pumped the brakes on impeachment talks—largely for this reason—in April following the release of the Mueller report, which found that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential elections and outlined the various contacts Team Trump had with Russians. It was only when news of Trump’s efforts to get Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden surfaced, through a complaint of an anonymous whistleblower, that she came around to it. “I think the speaker was very reluctant despite compelling evidence. I think she was very aware of the divisions that impeachment proceedings bring,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) who serves on the House judiciary committee. “But I think when the Ukraine scandal broke that changed a lot of things. I think everyone recognized that this was conduct different even from the Mueller report because it took place while he was president and it was a crime in progress. If we didn’t take action we would be a country with a president who could just pick up the phone and seek foreign assistance.”Following the news of the whistleblower complaint that alleged Trump had not just pressured Ukraine for investigations but attempted to hide records of it, some Republicans initially took interest. Several said they were willing to acknowledge Trump engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine. But as the trial inched closer, the majority of GOP lawmakers denounced the proceedings as a partisan attempt to kick Trump out of office.Still, for months Democrats clung to the hope that a steady stream of evidence and testimony from people inside the president’s own administration—including individuals he himself had appointed—would be enough to convince  a handful of Republicans to support ousting Trump. During the heart of the inquiry, one Democratic senator told The Daily Beast that he imagined roughly half a dozen of his GOP colleagues as being potential yes votes for conviction.Adam Schiff: Trump Saying I Should Pay a Price Is ‘Intended to Be’ a ThreatThe Democrats’ argument that Trump abused his office seemed to lose steam as the days rolled by in the senate. The chamber itself was often filled with sleepy senators, on both sides of the aisle, doodling on notepads as House managers laid out the evidence that they’d already made public months before. Meanwhile, Democrats quickly went from hailing their work in the House to defending the very essence of why they moved to an impeachment investigation in the first place. By design of the president’s legal team, the trial became an argument primarily over process, not the evidence, and turned into a tit-for-tat over whether the case was even worth debating. “There’s a proper way to do things and an upside-down way of doing things,” Patrick Philbin, deputy White House counsel, said on the Senate floor in the days leading up to the witness vote. “And to have the House not go through a process that is thorough and complete, and to just rush things through in a partisan and political manner and then dump it on to this chamber to clean everything up is a very dangerous precedent to be set.”Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), a member of the House intelligence committee, told The Daily Beast in an interview that Republicans were “hiding behind the process” because they understood the facts of the case looked “really bad.” And after more than a week of GOP lawmakers slamming the House impeachment investigators for presenting an incomplete case to the Senate, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA), who worked on the House investigation, batted away accusations that she and her colleagues could have done more. They had “jumped through hoops” to try and gather evidence and present the case to the American public,” Scanlon said. And yet, not everyone in the party was left fully satisfied. The House questioned dozens of witnesses during its investigation in the fall but it never issued subpoenas for witnesses for fear that the White House would defy them or bottle it up in court in order to drag the process along into irrelevancy. That formed the basis for another article of impeachment. But it also meant that key witnesses like former National Security Adviser John Bolton, were allowed to hide behind legal rationales for not having to appear. “It was the House of Representatives who refused to pursue the testimony of the witnesses because they wanted to impeach the President before Christmas,” Graham said on Twitter last week. “Only in Washington would someone call that decision “Blocking Witnesses.”Eventually, House Democrats and their aides told The Daily Beast that they began to view the committees’ relationship with Bolton as a dance—a will he/won’t he guessing game about whether he’d tell all to Congress and not just in a forthcoming book. Their hopes were raised when Bolton said he would appear in the Senate for questioning if required by subpoena.  “What we're saying now is that if you have any questions about what the president did you now have a new witness who was not willing to testify when we prosecute our case in the House who is now willing to testify and you should hear from him,” said Re. Eric Swallwell (D-CA), a member of the House intelligence committee.And for a brief moment during the three-week-long Senate trial, Democrats believed that the tide was about to turn in their favor and that Republicans would have no choice but to at the very least call Bolton to testify. The New York Times published a story January 26 that said Bolton’s upcoming book outlined the details of how Trump linked the investigations into the Bidens and the 2016 election with his administration’s freezing of military aid. And in the waning hours before senators voted on witnesses, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, released a statement that sent reporters into a tizzy, when he said he spoke with Bolton in September in the beginning stages of the House investigation and that the former Trump official had encouraged him to look into the ousting of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.Trump Suspects a Spiteful John Bolton Is Behind Some of the Ukraine LeaksNews of Bolton’s possible testimony reached as far as Kyiv where Oleksandr Danylyuk, Ukraine’s former counterpart to Bolton, told The Daily Beast that he trusted the former U.S. national security adviser more than anyone else in the Trump administration. But even with these revelations, GOP senators didn’t budge. “I certainly am not interested in hearing [Bolton] testify,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said during the witness debate. “The truth is if he wants to testify… the one place where you can have a dual lane where you can actually do the work of the people and have the impeachment process is in the House.”In the service of protecting Trump, no line of defense seemed to be too extreme or outlandish. The president’s legal representative, the media-loving lawyer Alan Dershowitz, took to the well of the Senate to push the novel theory that if Trump had done precisely what he was accused of doing—and in the service of his re-election no less—it would be de facto constitutional so long as he believed his actions were in the public interest. That line, along with broader pushback from Republicans, baffled and frustrated Democrats, particularly those intimately involved in the House investigations, whose cries for new witnesses seemed to grow from a place of annoyance.“We invited John Bolton to testify and you know what he told us? I’m not coming and if you subpoena me I will sue you,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on the Senate floor in his role as House manager. As focus centered on Bolton, another former Trump associate was pushing for his documents and testimony to be submitted for the record in the Senate trial. For weeks, Lev Parnas, an ex-associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, made public statements and television appearances discussing his time working with Giuliani and the efforts undertaken by President Trump in Ukraine. The Daily Beast obtained a recording from Joseph Bondy, the attorney for Parnas, that taped President Trump calling for the firing of Yovanovitch. Bondy said it was made by Igor Fruman, a former partner of Parnas.Bondy penned a letter to McConnell revealing that he had in his possession information "directly relevant to the President's impeachment inquiry.” But Republicans once again were unmoved, denouncing any attempts from Democrats to insert new evidence into the record as post-facto efforts to clean up an incomplete House investigation. With 51 votes needed for new witnesses or documents to be submitted, attention turned to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a key Republican swing vote. When the Tennessee Republican announced late on January 30—the night before the vote—that he would not call for more witnesses, it all but assured that the trial would end without additional testimony.Democrats made a last-ditch attempt to make their case, this time in a unified press conference with members of the Senate. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) finished the presser with a warning:“The bottom line is that at the end of this they will probably get what they want,” Harris said, referring to Republicans and the witness vote. “We are going to end this today or maybe tomorrow, but the evidence, the evidence that we know is available will not be presented and what that means as its bottom line is that this will not have been a fair trial and therefore they cannot walk out of this building and allege and assert that there has been a true acquittal.”But by Wednesday morning, all the pleading, the emotional speechifying on the Senate floor, the calls for lawmakers to vote their conscience—not their political interests—had seemed to be for naught. No witnesses had come and the time to vote was upon the chamber. A sense of sadness had set in; the realization that the measure would fail rather dramatically and Trump would get the vindication he craved. That still may be true. But before lawmakers registered their positions, Democrats were offered the rarest of political developments: a genuine surprise. Romney took to the floor to announce that he would back conviction. And in doing so, he gave them just a smidgen of affirmation that their efforts had indeed been strong enough to overcome the president’s pull on his party. He became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president of his own party. “The grave question the constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor. Yes, he did,” Romney said. “My vote will likely be the minority in the Senate but irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? 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