5347

January 22, 2020

Play it, yo. It’s a number that came up over and over last night in the U.S. Capitol as the Senate voted on measures to introduce evidence and witnesses in President Trump’s Impeachment trial. There are 53 Repubs and 47 Dems, so 53-47 wasn’t just some random Win4 result. It was the predictable outcome when neither Party breaks ranks.

To those dismayed by this degree of extreme partisanship (the 2 Articles passed the House mostly along Party lines too) one can only say it’s not surprising. After all, the President got 3 million fewer votes than his opponent did and the Senate ‘majority’ represents as many as 12 million fewer Americans than that chamber’s ‘minority.’ Granted, these are the rules set out by the FFs back when the biggest state and the smallest were not so differently sized as they are today. None had more than a million residents. The biggest, VA, had 700,000 and the smallest, DE, 60,000 (difference 640,000). All 13 combined had under 4 million, and there were no states at all west of the Mississippi River.

Today, California’s 2 Senators represent nearly 40 million people and Wyoming’s pair just about 500,000 (difference 39.5 million). Neither one was even a state yet when the Connecticut Compromise was adopted in 1787 giving every state, regardless of population, the same number of Senators. The current minority government has also appointed hundreds of Federal judges including 2 Supreme Court Justices.

Twenty years ago the GOP impeached a twice elected Democrat President who had actually won the popular vote as well as the EC, and who enjoyed approval twice as high as the current White House occupant. So complaints about this impeachment reversing an election (if Trump is removed his running mate VP Pence will become President – not Hillary Clinton), a ‘coup‘ (ditto) or ‘unconstitutional’ (it’s literally in the Constitution) must be viewed objectively and not taken at face value. The trial resumes later on today.