The weak reasons Sens. Tillis and Burr are meek about impeachment

North Carolina’s two Republican U.S. senators voted Tuesday – fortunately without success – against the Senate holding a trial on the impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

No surprise there. Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Thom Tillis are party stalwarts who rarely go against their tribe. According to the website FiveThirtyEight, Burr and Tillis voted in accord with Trump’s position nine times out of 10. Still, it’s stunning to see the senators’ party loyalty blot out their conscience in the case of a president charged with inciting an insurrection that stormed into their own chamber.

On the day of the mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, Burr said that Trump was guilty of “promoting the unfounded conspiracy theories that have led to this point.” Tillis more vaguely asserted: ”It’s a national disgrace to have a mob attacking Capitol Police and engaging in anarchy. This is not what America stands for.”

But the senators’ righteousness of Jan. 6 has dissipated like yesterday’s tear gas. Now they offer thin justifications for skipping a trial of the president whose false claim of a stolen election – a claim he still maintains – fueled the attack on the Capitol. Burr says let the Justice Department decide if charges are merited. Tillis says impeachment is intended only for removal, not a reckoning after a president departs.

This is weak stuff from weak-kneed senators. Virtually all impeachments of presidents and other federal office holders – some of whom had left office – have involved a trial. Why would this case, based the most serious of impeachment charges, not merit a full hearing and vote by the Senate? It’s one thing to vote to acquit Trump after a trial. It’s an abdication of duty to say the American people should not even hear the evidence.

Tillis, whose subservience to Trump has been embarrassing both for him and North Carolina, offered a reason for opposing the trial that was exceptionally woolly headed. He said an impeachment vote could set up a party-line vote to disqualify Trump from ever running for office. That, he said, would be the same as Republicans barring Hillary Clinton from running because she used a private email server while she was secretary of state.

According to Tillis’ judgment, Clinton’s failure to protect the security of her email is on the same plane as a president refusing to accept the outcome of an election and urging his supporters to swarm Capitol Hill and “fight like hell” to stop Congress from certifying the election. In the riot that followed, several people died.

And what of the offense by the other Clinton – President Bill Clinton? In 1998, Burr, then a member of the House, voted to impeach Clinton for lying to a grand jury about having consensual sex with a White House intern.

Burr declared then, “The United States is a nation of laws, not men, and I do not believe we can ignore the facts or disregard the Constitution so that the president can be placed above the law.”

What a difference time and party affiliation make.

The willingness of North Carolina’s senators to put party before country and expediency before history is behavior they have trained us well to expect. But it is striking that they would remain within the worn grooves of partisanship when they are unusually free to take a different path. Burr, now in his third Senate term, said he will not seek re-election in 2022. Tillis was just re-elected and won’t face voters again until 2026. If there ever was an opportunity to do the right thing at no or minimal political cost, that time is now for both senators.

But Burr and Tillis have passed on the opportunity – an opportunity five other Republican senators accepted – to show a measure of independence and support a hearing of the facts. They voted that there should be no trial for Trump and in so doing they failed their own.