Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Roy Blunt and Sen. Joni Ernst arrive for a news conference in the Capitol on October 22, 2019, in Washington, D.C.Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

By William Rivers Pitt,

Truthout

When the definitive history of Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry is written, William B. Taylor Jr. will require a chapter all his own. The career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine put the bricks to Trump’s “no quid pro quo” defense on Tuesday during closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, and did so in terms so stark and clear that gasps and sighs could be heard from the lawmakers as they listened.

The outline of Taylor’s testimony became public after The Washington Post obtained and published a copy of his 15-page opening statement. The document reads like a litany of doom for Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, U.S. ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland (who should probably be talking to an attorney versed in perjury defenses after his own testimony was soundly refuted by Taylor) and everyone else involved in running Trump’s “shadow diplomacy” in Ukraine.

According to Taylor and the ample supporting evidence he offered, the matter is plain: Donald Trump manipulated the foreign policy of the United States in an attempt to gain an advantage over a political rival and that rival’s party.

It does not get any more quid pro quo than that.

All of a sudden, Mitch McConnell and his Republican pals in the Senate have a serious decision to make, and soon. If articles of impeachment are drafted and put to a full House vote, the outcome at this point is all but guaranteed: Donald Trump will be impeached. For the Republicans, the hard part will begin with the Senate trial to determine if Trump should be removed.

With the full Senate chamber seated, it will require 67 votes to remove Trump from office. There are 47 senators who caucus with the Democrats, leaving a 20-vote gap for removal. Some 19 Republican senators are running for re-election in 2020, and the pressure on some of them — Martha McSally, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner to name a few — will be extreme. Leaving aside the fate of Donald Trump, the balance of power in the Senate may very well also be in play depending on how these imperiled Republican senators vote during an impeachment trial.

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