Brit Hume: Democrats rushed 'half-baked' impeachment article to trial
FOX News senior political analyst breaks down day one of Senate proceedings on 'Fox News Primetime'
The "loathing which the constituency of the Democratic Party holds [for] Donald Trump" cannot be underestimated, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume told "Fox News Primetime" Tuesday.
The Senate voted to proceed earlier Tuesday with the trial of the former president on a single article of impeachment following approximately four hours of arguments delivered by Trump's legal team and House impeachment managers.
At least 17 Republicans would need to vote to convict Trump in order to reach the two-thirds vote threshold, assuming all Democrats held the party line, but Hume said he finds it unlikely the trial will yield a conviction at all.
"I don't think they believe they have any more chance of convicting Donald Trump than the Republicans really thought they could get a vote to convict Bill Clinton [in 1999]," he told host Mark Steyn.
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"Impeachment, as you seem to have noticed, is an utterly political undertaking," Hume went on. "This particular impeachment ... seems especially half-baked to me, in the sense the House acted in desperate haste to try to get it under the wire before the president had actually left the office, and it's a single count.
Hume added that "there was no investigation, no hearings, no witnesses called, no nothing, and they sent the whole thing over to the Senate, where there is no indication that enough Republicans would join Democrats to create the two-thirds needed to convict. So, I think it is a foregone conclusion, and I think everybody knows that."
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If Trump is convicted, the Senate can hold a vote on whether to bar him from running for office again in the future.
Hume told Steyn that he thinks the second impeachment of Trump "will have the same political effect as the last one did, which is to say practically none.
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"I mean, it was basically never mentioned after about a month after the impeachment," he said. "It never came up during the election campaign, at all, by either side, it disappeared into the mist, and I suspect this one is heading for the same fate."
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