WASHINGTON Years after professing admiration for the Great Compromiser Henry Clay but then engineering a dramatic remake of the federal judiciary, Mitch McConnell is now earning a different legacy: The guy who rigged a Senate trial to protect a president impeached for trying to cheat his way to reelection.

With even members of his own caucus agreeing that Donald Trump behaved badly by leveraging $391 million in taxpayer-funded foreign aid to damage a political rival, the Senates majority leader is on the brink of acquitting Trump without hearing from a single witness defying the three-quarters of Americans who say they want witnesses.

Sadly, the constitutional travesty that he orchestrated here will serve as his legacy, said George Conway , a prominent Republican Trump critic and husband of a top White House aide. Not the legions of fine judges he has put on the bench, judges of the sort that would have been nominated by a President Pence even if Trump had been removed, as he rightly should have been.