Forgiveness in the U.S. Senate

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This article was published 10/02/2021 (1868 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You would have to go back to the era of the American Civil War to find a bigger collection of partisan hypocrites and sycophants than the current crop of Republican senators. Other than a select few who have not forsaken their integrity — most notably, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Lisa Murkowski — the others remain terrified of angering former president Donald Trump and his angry base.

Thus an overwhelming majority will almost certainly acquit Trump in his Senate impeachment trial — seven Republicans would have to vote with all 48 Democrats and two independents to convict him — for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 (their Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives, led by Trump loyalist Kevin McCarthy and including nutty conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene and gun-rights fanatic Lauren Boebert, are just as bad or worse.)

Typical is South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham, whose contortions make your head spin. Consider that in December 2015, Graham denounced Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot”; after Trump was elected president, Graham became Trump’s devoted golfing buddy and subservient fan.

Following the 2020 election, Graham claimed the voting in Georgia had been fraudulent, though he offered no evidence to support that accusation. Nonetheless, like nearly every other Senate Republican, he refused to recognize Joe Biden’s victory for two months.

Then, in the aftermath of the Capitol building riot, Graham finally conceded that Biden had won the election and that attempting to halt the certification of the results was unwarranted. And, indeed, he voted against the absurd efforts to stop the electoral college certifications in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Yet when Trump was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting the riot Graham had decried, he decided this was not justified. He has already suggested he will not vote to convict Trump in the Senate trial. It is no wonder that in his memoirs, Barack Obama aptly describes Graham like a character in a spy thriller “who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin.”

Worse than Graham and the opportunistic Mitch McConnell, now the minority leader, are Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri. Smug, snide and duplicitous, both clearly see themselves inheriting Trump’s mantle, and both have presidential aspirations. But their controversial actions in feeding the frenzied mob on Jan. 6 — there is a widely publicized photograph of a defiant Hawley saluting them — and leading the campaign against certifying the electoral college results — which they inexplicably continued following the violence — have led to angry condemnation and calls for them to be expelled or at the very least, censured.

Expulsion — which, like conviction in an impeachment trial, requires a vote in favour of two-thirds, or 67 senators — is unlikely to happen in a Senate now split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. In fact, the last time sitting senators were expelled was during the early years of the Civil War, for supporting the Confederacy. All were slave-supporting members of the Democratic Party.

Since then, attempts to expel 13 senators (between 1873 and 2011) for such transgressions as corruption, disloyalty and fraud have failed to obtain the required vote, or the senators in question resigned before a full vote was taken. In 1995, for example, Bob Packwood, a Republican senator from Oregon who was accused by 19 women of sexual abuse and assault, quit before an expulsion vote, which likely would have passed (highly critical of Packwood was then-chairman of the Senate ethics committee, McConnell).

Likewise, in 2011, another Republican senator, John Ensign of Nevada, who faced an ethics committee investigation for having an affair with a campaign aide, resigned his seat before the then-Democratic majority Senate voted on his expulsion.

A more probable scenario for Cruz and Hawley is a vote of censure, though that does not carry the same weight as expulsion. Since 1811, only nine senators have been censured; the last time it happened was in 1990, when Minnesota’s Republican senator David Durenberger was censured for ethics violations, for accepting speaking fees in excess of what was permitted.

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The most famous censure in the history of the Senate occurred in December 1954: a Republican-majority Senate voted 67 to 22 (with 22 Republicans voting against) to censure Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. The censure was not, however, for McCarthy leading a despicable four-year campaign to root out alleged Communists; rather, it was for his refusal to co-operate with Senate committees investigating his conduct.

History rightly has not been kind to McCarthy, though that took many years. The lesson here is that he sloughed off the vote of censure, as did his numerous supporters, who portrayed him as a victim of “a corrupt and self-interested Washington establishment,” according to Yale University historian Beverly Gage.

McCarthy died in 1957 from alcoholism, but the Senate’s action against him, as Gage adds, “helped fuel the far-right’s grievance politics — and spark what would become the modern conservative movement.”

Which is how the U.S. ended up with Trump, Cruz and Hawley, among others.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His most recent book is Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder.