Former President Trump was acquitted in the Senate on Saturday, bringing his historic second impeachment trial to a close.
The final vote was 57-43 in favor of convicting him — not enough for the two-thirds majority needed. Democrats needed 17 Republicans to side with them to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection. They received seven.
However, this was still one of the more bipartisan efforts in the Senate recently.
After the vote, several of the Republicans who voted Trump ‘not guilty’ still declared Trump responsible for the insurrection.
Among them was Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who used language that just as easily could have been used by House Democrats in favor of convicting the president.
“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth,” McConnell said shortly after the final vote.
McConnell’s stated reason for his ‘not guilty’ vote was that Trump was no longer in office. McConnell was the person who prevented the Senate trial from starting while the president was still in office.
In a press release on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “It is so pathetic that Senator McConnell kept the Senate shut down so that the Senate could not receive the article of impeachment and has used that as his excuse for not voting to convict Donald Trump.”
Ultimately, the real verdict of the impeachment trial may be left to history: Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania made her closing argument an appeal to history books. “If we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past,” the impeachment manager said.
“The past will become our future. Senators, we are in a dialogue with history.”