A Republican political consultant and advisor to the campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush says it would only take three senators to turn on President Donald Trump to increase the chances of him being removed from office when the impeachment proceedings reach the upper chamber.
Writing in Politico magazine, Juleanna Glover, who has worked for a number of prominent Republicans — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Rudy Giuliani among them — says just the three senators would have to step up and demand that the vote on whether to remove Trump be held in secret instead of openly as has been done in the past.
“If they didn’t have to face backlash from constituents or the media or the president himself, who knows how many Republican senators would vote to remove?” Glover writes.
In an open ballot following the Senate impeachment trial, Trump seems certain to prevail because he would need 20 Republican senators to vote to remove him from office. A secret ballot might be another story, however. Glover points to speculation that between 30 and 35 Republican senators would turn on Trump if they could do so secretly.
In Glover’s three-senator scenario, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his Republican colleagues will need to lay out the ground rules for the impeachment trial. He needs a simple majority—51 of the 53 Senate Republicans—to support any resolution outlining those rules. Just three senators would have to break from the caucus and demand that the verdict vote be secret. – READ MORE