quote:

It is true that the Senate can establish its own rules governing the impeachment trial. It would only take the entirety of the Democratic caucus (and the agreement of Vice President Harris) to implement a rule under which the final vote on Trump’s guilt would be cast in private. But there’s a catch, as Louis Michael Seidman, Carmack Waterhouse professor of constitutional law at Georgetown Law, noted in an email to The Washington Post.

Article I of the Constitution, he wrote, “provides ‘the Yeas and Nays of Members of either house on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.’ So I guess the question is whether it would be constitutional to have a secret ballot if fewer than [one-fifth] objected — a very unlikely hypothetical. I see no reason why not.”

In other words, yes, there could be a secret vote — but only if there weren’t 20 Republicans, one-fifth of the chamber, who called for the vote to be made public. That is, in fact, a very unlikely hypothetical. There may be Republicans who’d like to vote to convict if the vote were conducted in private, but it is almost certainly not a group that constitutes 31 of the 50 Republicans in the Senate. If 20 senators, Democratic or Republican, want the vote to be public, the Constitution says they can make it public. The end.