Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Washington Post tells us, wants a "drama-free" impeachment trial, and got what he wanted out of the first day with "a Senate looking somber and serious […] A Senate that might, as he put it a day before, be capable of rising above 'short-termism and factional fever.'"
Well, he's getting what he wanted out of the Post, anyway; an uncritical report of McConnell as the disinterested Senate leader rather than rabid partisan and Donald Trump's number 1 protector. As close as this report from Paul Kane comes to reporting the reality—McConnell has already coordinated with the White House to guarantee Trump's protection—is the acknowledgement that "McConnell, knowing that he currently has the votes to acquit Trump, does not want the Senate trial to come off looking anything like the partisan brawl in the House or a typical Trumpian event."
This is going to be as deeply partisan as anything we saw in the House hearings, but it will be kept under the veneer of procedure and tight rules that significantly constrain the minority. He's just lucky that he can manipulate the rules to disallow the likes of Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul to show their "factional fever."
And as far as the rules go, that's not something McConnell is being forthcoming about, especially with Democrats. Things they still don't know, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Kane, are what happens when the Trump team tries to go rogue with presenting their Ukraine corruption/Hunter Biden conspiracy theories. "What's the procedure for blocking that evidence?" Blumenthal asked. "Do the managers have to object? Can senators object? And how is it going to be done?" No one at this point knows, and McConnell isn't going to let anything slip. He's being as opaque with his fellow senators as he is with the Capitol Hill press corps, which is already giving him the benefit of the doubt.
McConnell might get the veneer of institutional integrity with this trial, particularly with the press being shut out, but make no mistake about what's really happening. Underneath that veneer, it's as corrupt as anything Trump has done. The fix is in.