Get ready for the Trump Senate impeachment trial as partisan farce: Mastio & Lawrence

JILL: Judgment Day is coming for the Senate, and for the life of me I can’t understand why Republicans don’t see it as an escape hatch — the one time in over 200 years you really might want and need to break the glass because there is in fact an emergency.

It’s not that I don’t get the political considerations involved here. President Donald Trump has an intimidating hold on the party, or at least the huge chunk of it that, like him, enjoys breaking eggs and the hell with making an omelet. They seem to view the Constitution as a tear-down, a starter manifesto, and they take the phrase “bully pulpit” completely literally.

There’s no question that bucking this president and his loyalists would make a senator’s life miserable, even a senator who is not running for reelection. And for those who are up in 2020, it’s a Hobson’s choice of alienating Republican primary voters or disgusted general election voters.

And if Trump by some miracle is convicted and removed by the Senate, there's the political problem that Vice President Mike Pence is no Donald Trump. He’s a traditional business and Christian conservative who doesn't seem interested in inciting policy, management and constitutional chaos for the sheer fun of it. So there goes that part of the Trump base. Plus he'd be tainted by Trump scandals and his enabling role.

On the other hand, given the vagaries of the Electoral College, not to mention the Democrats, the alternative to abdicating on impeachment could be four more years of Trump. Four more years of an ignorant constitutional outlaw who calls his top generals "a bunch of dopes and babies," and they sit there and take it, and obey his orders. Are Republicans up for that?

DAVID: If there is one thing that has shocked me in the last three years, it is how completely Republican office holders and conservative media have abandoned their principles in adopting whatever the latest completely unsupportable drivel that leaks out of Donald Trump’s Twitter account. From my conversations with Trump-world Republicans, they don’t want an escape hatch, an off-ramp or any other kind of exit strategy.

They’ll be standing by Trump whatever comes in the Senate trial, new witnesses or not. Damning new facts or not. And when you are talking to Republicans, even in private, they do a pretty good imitation of being true believers in Trump. Why’s that? In the short term, Trump is the only route to clinging to power.

Pence is viewed as weak tea in rallying the base. And after years of Trump, there’s not much hope on the right for reaching out to the middle in the coming presidential election. Blue-collar Democrats aren’t going to defect to Pence’s traditional brand of Republicanism and he can’t really fake populism with Trump’s verve. Without Trump winning at the top of the ticket, hopes for keeping a grip on the Senate are not high.

I don’t care how damaged Trump is by the Senate impeachment trial next week, there’s no hope his Republican backers will abandon him.

More: What we learned about Trump and 2020 from the 2019 Democratic debates

JILL: That is a dark view of the party, and probably justified. But until it’s over, as Bill Clinton used to say before The Troubles descended upon him, I still believe in a place called Hope.

Speaking of Clinton, I wished desperately for him to resign in 1998. I couldn’t believe what he was doing to his family and the country, or to my kids — a 13-year-old learning about how men should treat women and a 9-year-old who fled the kitchen one night, muttering “I shouldn’t be listening to this” as he ran. But I was a reporter covering the mess and couldn’t say publicly what I thought.

It was an easier calculation then for a Democrat than it would be now for a Republican, granted. Al Gore had been picked, in violation of the usual “balancing” function of a vice president, to echo and reinforce Clinton’s youth, Southern background and centrist policy ideas. America was not going to swerve in some dramatic new direction.

Gore was a much stronger potential successor than Pence would be. And yet he lost the presidency 20 years ago amid peace and prosperity. He won a half million more votes than George W. Bush, and the Florida count that gave Bush a 537-vote lead and the presidency was plagued by bad ballot designs and other problems that made the margin meaningless. But Clinton’s ethics miasma and the desire to turn the page had made it way too close. If the Senate proves as hapless as you think, we can only hope that voters this year will feel a similar compulsion to send to the Oval Office, if not a fresh face, at least a different one.

DAVID: If Democrats has turned on Clinton and forced him out, we’d be in a better place. Instead, for the most part, Democrats pursued toothless punishments, defended the indefensible, made excuses or attacked Clinton’s antagonists. They then spent the next 16 years slavishly promoting and defending Hillary Clinton from her own raft of unprecedented scandals. As if a secretary of State’s family foundation accepting foreign contributions could be defended on any principle. The example they set was of putting partisanship and personal loyalty over country.

Now Republicans don’t feel one bit of shame in doing the same thing — even as they defend, deflect and deny radically more scandalous behavior by Trump. It is the same unhealthy partisanship that has infected nominations to the Supreme Court, where we’ve seen a tit for tat descent into anything-goes rancor without regard for the Constitution or decency, the shameful treatment of Merrick Garland being the most egregious, if not most recent, example.

Get ready for an impeachment trial shaped by the worst of our politics over the last quarter century. Maybe moderate voters on both sides will start to punish their own partisans out of embarrassment. I doubt it, so we can be sure this isn’t the bottom, not with a second term for Trump as likely as not.

David Mastio, a libertarian conservative, is the deputy editor of USA TODAY's editorial page. Jill Lawrence, a center-left liberal, is the commentary editor of USA TODAY. Follow them on Twitter: @DavidMastio and @JillDLawrence

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Impeachment trial judgment day: Are Republicans good with 4 more years?