Five of us had a meeting this morning with Senator Capito's staff in Morgantown. We thought we would be talking to her local rep but instead her legislative director was there.
He listened to our rants about Trump's impeachable offenses and offered pushback along the lines of "what is impeachable?", "no one is talking to her about it", and "she should do what her constituents want". What her constituents want is a fix for miner’s pensions, improved infrastructure, and help with the opioid epidemic. We made it clear that at least five of her constituents considered a constitutional crisis something we cared about.
He said she is committed to a trial in the Senate and opposed to summarily dropping charges (he said McConnell is also, which was news to us). She has said that so far she hasn’t heard anything that would make her vote to convict. (She also hasn’t said that she has heard anything that would make her vote to acquit- she has been very quiet on the subject.)
He talked about the Clinton impeachment process and someone said that Nixon was more relevant. I piped up and said that Judge Alcee Hastings was even closer since he was impeached and convicted by his own party for taking a bribe. He then said something that blew me out of the water:
I have been talking to people involved in the Hastings trial. Conviction takes 67 votes. But once they have voted to convict it only takes 51 votes to permanently disqualify that person from ever holding federal office again. No one realized that, and Hastings went on to run for the House and is still a representative 20 years later.
I couldn't believe that a senior Republican Senate staffer was gratuitously pointing out that they could disqualify as well as convict. I had no clue, but it has only been done three times in our history and I am not a legal scholar. So they are talking about the possibility that if they do develop spines and vote him out, they can also make sure that he can never come back to power. And the latter will take only a couple of Republican votes.
All in all it was an interesting conversation. He stayed on script and didn’t give much ground. But he did listen to us and didn’t disparage us. I am not counting on Captito voting to convict, but I expect she is one of the ones Jeff Flake was referring to when he said a secret ballot would convict Trump in a heartbeat.