The Looming Electoral Disaster

President Trump could become the first president ever to be impeached by the House and then seek another term in the next election | Analysis by @RonBrownstein https://t.co/tQvBPnVlxX

— CNN (@CNN) October 15, 2019

It has occurred to me there is a very simple reason why the GOP Senate will not remove Donald Trump from office, and it isn't because the historical precedent for doing so doesn't exist (although the inertia of that should not be rejected lightly).

It is because of November, 2020.  If the GOP Senate removes Donald Trump from office sometime in early 2020, or even in the Spring of 2020, who is the GOP nominee for the highest office in the land in November?  To remove Donald Trump from office now would be slitting the throat of the GOP, and the hand holding the blade would be:  the GOP.  Impeachment, we are constantly reminded (usually in poorly argued responses to GOP demands for "due process" in the House impeachment investigation), is a political process.

By what political process does a party willingly commit an act of national hari-kiri?

It's not going to happen; plain and simple.  Reinhold Niebuhr noted the paradox in Moral Man and Immoral Society.  Individuals may have a conscience, and may make sacrifices based on that conscience; but they cannot expect organizations, even nations, to do so.  More importantly, they cannot sacrifice the organization for their personal moral concerns.  The organization is the guarantor of the group, and nothing is clearer in American politics than that political parties are guarantors of political power.  They do not represent the nation, and certainly don't exist to protect the Constitution.  Individuals may swear an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," but they will not act collectively on that oath for the sake of the Constitution itself.  That would put them at odds to their duty to the party, and in that fight the Constitution is an abstraction, a thing of arguments, and the party is reality.  Senators may find their conscience pricked by the mad incompetence and even clear and present danger of Donald Trump.  But they can act to preserve the party to live and fight another day.

The GOP is not going to destroy itself and cede the White House race in 2020 entirely to the Democrats.  They may be doing that by standing behind Donald Trump, but they certainly do that if they remove Donald Trump from office.  Mike Pence?  Don't make me laugh.  Joe Walsh?  Mark Sanford?  You must be joking.  The GOP may go down with Trump, but they'll do it the old-fashioned way, they way they did with Goldwater:  at the ballot box.

There is no way they engage in an act of national self-immolation, no matter what the situation is in Syria, no matter how much prestige and honor and glory Trump wins for Russia.

Tut-tut all the pundits want, these are the conditions that prevail.  No political party is ever going to willingly offer itself as a sacrifice on the public funeral pyre for the sake of the country.  Say "they should" all you want; they won't.  They simply won't.*

*and don't bring up the example of Nixon and pine for the "good old days" when men of integrity sat in the Congress.  Nixon was a lame duck, and the GOP was trying to salvage what it could.  Ford was President for over 2 years; Pence would be president for only months, and Republicans would be forced to either back Pence blindly, or suddenly hold primaries and get candidates on ballots in 50 states, and pray they didn't have a brokered convention.  The same calculus made about Nixon would be made now, and the decision to stand fast and ride it out would still be reached.