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Thursday, February 6th, 2020

In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear

Author:     Sherrod Brown
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     5 February 2020
 Link: In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear
Stephan:   Here are the words of an honorable man, the kind of person you want to be a senator, even when you don't agree with them because they consistently seek to foster wellbeing, and have an ethical spine.

Senate voting against impeachment of Donald Trump
Credit: Wikipedia

Not guilty. Not guilty.

In the United States Senate, like in many spheres of life, fear does the business.

Think back to the fall of 2002, just a few weeks before that year’s crucial midterm elections, when the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq was up for a vote. A year after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of members of the House and the Senate were about to face the voters of a country still traumatized by terrorism.

Senator Patty Murray, a thoughtful Democrat from Washington State, still remembers “the fear that dominated the Senate leading up to the Iraq war.”

“You could feel it then,” she told me, “and you can feel that fear now” — chiefly among Senate Republicans.

  For those of us who, from the start, questioned the wisdom of the Iraq war, our sense of isolation surely wasn’t much different from the loneliness felt in the 1950s […]

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