US Senate voted to totally refuse witnesses and document evidence. How soon will it come back to bite the GOP in the BEE-hind?

It certainly will end up taking a HUGE bite out of their collective BEE-hind. The only question is, how quickly?

My favorite blogger (beside the Arizona Eagletarian, 😉 ) Teri Kanefield, this evening posted,

What happened is this: McConnell made a calculation. He knows what is in the excluded evidence and he determined [hopes] that allowing evidence would be more damaging than conducting a sham trial. This tells you the evidence is devastating.

McConnell prefers to [rather, figures he can] deal with the devastating [what he believes will only be a] drip-drip in the media because the GOP has a well-oiled media-propaganda loop.

For multiple reasons, I believe that both Teri and #MoscowMitch are underestimating the speed and severity of the bite the GOP will most certainly suffer.

First, 75 percent of Americans want to see witness testimony and documents be entered into the trial record.

Second, that 75 percent figure indicates the White House Occupant's persistent claims that the press is the "enemy of the people" hasn't taken root. Maybe an analogy to a woman scorned (i.e. hell hath no fury like...) might seem hyperbolic, but... come on. Did you see what the appointed (but not annointed by the People) Sen. Martha McSally did recently?




Do you REALLY think a FREE PRESS is going to take what the Occupant and his minion Martha have to say about them lying down?

Consider the tone of the editorial published by the Washington Post within minutes of the vote to exclude witnesses.

The cringing abdication of Senate Republicans.

REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she weighed supporting “additional witnesses and documents, to cure the shortcomings” of the House’s impeachment process, but decided against doing so. Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.” [...]

Americans who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’ complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder of that came Friday in a New York Times report about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.

That report underlined the cringing shamefulness of the Republican decision to block Mr. Bolton’s testimony — and there will surely be more reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much as the bully in the White House.

There will most certainly be more. Much more. I don't see journalists or journalism, even corporate journalists (or the American People for that matter) taking this without a whole helluva lot of righteous indignation and determined arguments. Do you? WaPo columnist Dana Milbank later Friday, describing the trial as rigged (seriously, who wouldn't believe that?) finished his column thus,

In their cowardly, 51-to-49 vote Friday evening to speed a guilty president on his way to a hasty acquittal while suppressing the evidence, Trump’s protectors planted the seeds of a poisonous harvest in November. [Note: Mitt Romney and Susan Collins voted with the 47 Dems]

Don't take my word for it. Consider the wisdom of Mark Twain or whoever really coined the expression.