Follow the money on impeachment: Trump bought off the jury — and hints at bigger tax cuts

It's long been obvious that Republican senators have little interest in serving as impartial jurors in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. While there is a raft of motivations for such historic perfidy — with several GOP senators politically benefiting from some of the same corrupting influences — one under-examined, non-Russian reason is personal greed.

A new report reveals that the 2017 GOP tax law was rife with monumental self-dealing by rich GOP lawmakers who have since benefited bigly. According to a Center for Public Integrity analysis, several Republican members of Congress directly cashed in on the multibillion-dollar windfall from the corporate tax cuts the GOP pushed through on a party-line vote. With the lowest effective tax rate in the last 40 years, America's largest corporations proceeded to pour $1 trillion not into increased wages for workers but buybacks of their own stocks, causing stock prices to soar. Coincidentally, many Republican lawmakers who voted for the largest tax cut signed into law by Trump personally owned some of the same stocks whose values significantly increased as a result.