At the time, the media speculated that Schumer might be able to pressure Senate Republican moderates into voting his way on the set of rules to govern the trial. Instead, Schumer’s grandstanding pushed at least Susan Collins in the opposite direction:

In an interview Monday, the Maine Republican criticized the Senate minority leader for widely publicizing his opening offer before Schumer had even sat down with Mitch McConnell.

“I was surprised that he didn’t first sit down with the Senate majority leader and discuss his proposals rather than doing a letter that he released to the press,” Collins said. “The more constructive way would have been for him to sit down with Sen. McConnell.”

Politico calls this “an aggressive play from the chamber’s top Democrat,” but other Republicans have responded in kind. If Schumer really wants more fact witnesses in a Senate trial, they also have a list of people they’d looooooove to put under oath:

Several GOP senators said any conversation on witnesses would quickly turn to subpoenaing Hunter Biden, who has come under scrutiny for his role advising Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father was vice president.

“If we’re going to have witnesses … then you’re going to have allow the defense to call witnesses that they believe are exculpatory. If that’s the direction [Democrats] want to go, then that’s what we’ll do,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “You can’t have a process where only side gets to call unlimited witnesses.”

“I want to hear from Hunter Biden … I want to hear from the whistleblower,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Hawley added that he “would be shocked” if any Republicans backed Schumer’s proposal.

Rubio’s point is well taken, especially since he might have been one of the Senate Republicans Schumer had hoped to woo. A trial with only one side’s witnesses would look a lot like, well … the kangaroo court Adam Schiff staged on impeachment. It takes a lot of chutzpah to tell Republicans that a fair trial would involve imposing the Schiff rules on the Senate Republican majority — while also demanding that they pursue the subpoenas that Schiff couldn’t bother to enforce through the courts.

It’s not just exculpation that the GOP majority might pursue, either. After what happened in the Horowitz report as well as with the whistleblower, Senate Republicans might even want to call Schiff, too. They’d at least want to subpoena his staff over their interactions with the whistleblower, especially as to the assistance they provided in crafting his complaint and then publicizing it. The person who’d love this the most would be Donald Trump himself, who has been egging on Senate Republicans for full-on partisan combat in the upcoming trial.

McConnell and the other Republicans would prefer to dispense with this quickly. Given the polling, one has to wonder why Schumer doesn’t want to dispense with it more quickly. Was he trying a briar-patch strategy yesterday, hoping to annoy Republicans into unifying on a game plan for a quick dismissal? Or did Schumer really think that he could strike up some support for his proposal among Senate moderates by grandstanding to the media? If it’s the latter, this looks like a pretty classic backfire, especially with Susan Collins castigating him in the media in response.

Update: I missed this last night, but Townhall’s Julio Rosas picked it up this morning:

I don’t need a lecture from Democrats on the Constitution after this House debacle, which is being fully embraced by the Senate Democratic leadership.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 17, 2019

You can say many things about House impeachment, but you cannot say it is upholding the Rule of Law as @RepCunningham suggests.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 17, 2019