Thank The Cosmic Muffin

...for Laurence Tribe

If 30 of the 53 Republican Senators were to boycott the final Senate vote on whether or not to convict and remove 45* from the presidency, then “two-thirds of the Senators present” would equal 47, the exact number of Democratic Senators.

Enough to convict.

And it's just possible those 47 would be joined by a dozen Republican Senators who somehow manage to find their balls by then.

Ben Wofford, Washingtonian

A nugget of political arithmetic is suddenly everywhere: “Two-thirds majority.” This is the share of votes required to convict President Trump in an impeachment trial in the United States Senate. That’s 67 senators, if you’re counting—or, in the glass-half-empty variation, the number of Republican senators required to jump ship is 20.

Mostly, these numbers are used to cast doubtful sentiments on the prospect of impeachment. As CNN correspondent Manu Raju reports, convicting Trump “would require support from a two-thirds majority of the Senate—a highly unlikely proposition.”

- snip -

Not so fast.

The Constitution doesn’t indicate that removal from office requires two-thirds of the Senate. It requires two-thirds of senators present for the proceedings.

The inclusion of this single word in the Constitution’s impeachment clauses shifts the mathematical ledger of how impeachment, however unlikely, could go down. It allows for the all-important two-thirds threshold to exist along a sliding scale—far from the full attendance of the 100-member Senate. In theory, a vote to convict the President (or anyone else) would count as legal with as few as 34 members, not 67, assuming the absolute minimum (51) participated.

“The Constitution contains quorum requirements [elsewhere] and clearly distinguishes between percentages of a particular chamber and percentages of ‘members present,'” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the co-author of the book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. “That language in the provision for Senate conviction on impeachment charges is quite deliberate, creating precisely the possibility” described above.

The Senate’s formal rules on impeachment, last updated in 1986, repeat the Constitution’s “present” provision numerous times.

“It’s a sliding scale,” says Alan Frumin, the former Parliamentarian of the Senate who now holds emeritus status. “In other words, it’s not an absolute two-thirds, it’s two-thirds of some number. And there you get to the question of the denominator.”

So what we watch for is a signal that Senators are planning to boycott the proceedings - and we've already heard a few (albeit on the House side) saying they'll boycott certain hearings etc. 

If they sit in, but abstain from the vote, it fucks up the arithmetic because they'd be included in the "Senators present" calculation. But if they put on a show and bluster around making like they're outraged by the whole thing and want nothing to do with it - then there's a fair shot at pulling it off.

There's something poetic and karmic about delving into smarmspace to find a solution to Republican Smarmocracy.