From Jonathan Bernstein:
House Republicans didn’t bother to defend the president’s behavior since Election Day, even as most cast votes in his favor.
Donald Trump is now the only president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. That makes him responsible for half of the presidential impeachments in U.S. history. Just 10 Republicans joined all the House Democrats voting for impeachment on Wednesday, but that’s the largest number of representatives ever to vote to impeach their own party’s president.
In fact, it was worse than that for Trump. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he wanted to censure the president. Three other Republicans released a statement condemning his “words and actions.” Few Republicans who spoke in the House debate joined in condemning Trump’s actions, but few defended him, either. Not many of them spoke at all, and the ones who did spent more time talking about Black Lives Matters protests than about Trump.
Why?