The impeachment trial in the Senate is about to begin.  After months of Democratic showboating in the House of Representatives, which resulted in the passing of articles of impeachment against President Trump, and a further four-week postponement while Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed sending the formal articles to the Senate, Pelosi has now caved.

The main condition Pelosi sought, but did not get, was an assurance that the Democrats could call new witnesses who had not testified during the House proceedings.  Among the proposed witnesses are former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.  Instead, Mitch McConnell has declared that the question of witnesses, if any, will be decided by the full Senate after formal presentation of the charges by House managers and the initial defense by the president's team.

McConnell's decision to start the trial without an agreement on witnesses is consistent with former president Clinton's impeachment in 1999, when a resolution at the outset of the trial dealt only with setting up the process for the proceeding.  A second resolution, passed mid-trial, subpoenaed three witnesses to testify in closed-door depositions.  

Democrats should be careful what they wish for.  Any testimony by their proposed witnesses will hardly shift the needle in their favor or further their impossible task of tallying the sixty-seven senators needed to remove the president.  At best, any such testimony will merely confirm what people already know or think they know about the indictment against the president.  There is no smoking gun here, folks.

On the other hand, Democrats should keep in mind that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If the Democrats are allowed to call new witnesses, shouldn't the Republicans be equally entitled?  Senator Ted Cruz calls this "witness reciprocity."  Many Republicans would like the original whistleblower, Hunter Biden, and Adam Schiff, among others, to testify.

It would be the epitome of irony if the Democrats, having demanded witnesses for weeks, responded to the GOP's witness wish list by crying: "Not those witnesses!"

Democrats might argue that, unlike their own witnesses, who are merely repetitive, the Republican witnesses are irrelevant.  After all, the whistleblower's initial accusation has been confirmed by numerous witnesses, the "conspiracy theory against the Bidens has been repeatedly debunked," and what does Adam Schiff have to do with any of this?

These assertions are easily answered.  The whistleblower's account was merely hearsay, likely motivated by personal political bias, and, if undermined, goes a long way in undercutting the entire case for impeachment.  Although it has become part of the official Democratic creed that allegations against the Bidens have been "debunked" or "discredited, no one has set forth exactly where the allegations have been investigated or disproved or by whom.  And if there is something to the charge that Joe Biden held up financial aid to Ukraine in order to obtain personal advantage for himself and his family (an allegation that has an eerily familiar ring to it), then President Trump's demand that Ukraine investigate corruption in its midst seems less than a high crime or misdemeanor.  Finally, if Schiff's own House committee assisted the whistleblower in lodging his complaint and then piggybacked on that complaint to produce articles of impeachment against the president, well, something seems rotten in the state of Denmark.

At the end of the day, of course, the Senate trial, like the preceding impeachment proceedings in the House, is nothing but Kabuki drama.  Even Pelosi knows how it will end: with the president acquitted in the Senate and well on his way to re-election for a second term (due in large part to her own focus on these meaningless impeachment proceedings at the expense of the messages of Democratic candidates for president during this crucial primary season).  In the meantime, it might be amusing to watch the Democrats hoist with their own witnesses petard.

Steve Frank is an attorney, retired, after a 30-year career as an appellate lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where he argued over one hundred cases before the federal courts of appeals.  His writings on the law, national security, and architecture have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, the Houston Chronicle, and Moment magazine.