The Chief Justice may have to decide whether to break a 50-50 tie on the issue of having witnesses testify at the Senate trial.

I'm reading "Senate and John Roberts face possibility of epic tie on witnesses" (Politico) and wondering which way the Chief would go.

Must a tie be broken? No. Under the Senate's rules, nothing happens if there is no vote in favor of it. The Republicans win if the Democrats fail to amass 51 votes.

For weeks, Republicans and Democrats alike have been confident that Roberts would not break a tie vote during Trump’s impeachment trial, citing past precedent, the Constitution and their own gut feelings about how it would play in a polarized nation....

Some Democrats are beginning to opine that Roberts could save the Senate from itself and force consideration of witnesses if there's a tie. As Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) put it: “If he wants a fair, impartial trial and get the evidence out, I think there’s a fair shot he would vote for witnesses.”...

That is, if Roberts wants the Democratic side to win, he could activate himself and vote. But if he wants to remain neutral OR if he wants the GOP side to win, he can can maintain the posture of restraint.

Yet the smart money is still on Roberts staying out of it, or GOP leaders muscling through a 51-49 vote that avoids placing responsibility for the course of the trial on Roberts....

What's the motivation to help Roberts? Consider this question from the perspective of the 3 GOP Senators who are still considering voting with the Democrats.

How to act presidential in Hanoi.

I have now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate Senator from Connecticut (how is Connecticut doing?). His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud - he was never even there. We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019

The Russian government-affiliated troll farm was "sophisticated" enough to Facebook-target Ferguson and Baltimore with a "Black Lives Matter" ad.

CNN reports.

"This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West," Steve Hall, the former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst, said. "It shows they the [sic] level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues."...

[Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos] said, "the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."

Sowing racial discord — that's what we do for ourselves. How dare the Russians get in on the action! But if they did, were they trying to defeat Hillary and elect Trump or just screwing with us more generically?

In the end, we might think that Hillary lost because not enough black people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin felt like coming out and voting, so maybe there was some effect, but why would just a little more racial discord make a difference?

I'd like to see these ads, but if somehow the Russians figured out how to make a devastating race-based ad, I think there would have been Americans copying that message and running it on their own and we'd have been seeing it going viral on YouTube. If it were so powerful, it would not have remained targeted to Ferguson and Baltimore. It would have broken loose and gone national, and we'd all have been talking about it.

I found that article after encountering the Pajamas Media presentation of the issue, which was linked by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. Pajamas Media says — inaccurately, I think — "Narrative Fail: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support for Black Lives Matter, Clinton." Here's a screenshot that sums up why I can't stand to read Pajamas Media:

It was Hall, who's not a Senator, who talked about "the level of sophistication of [the] targeting." The only quoted Senator is Burr, a Republican. So who was absurd? I don't know, but it seems that there was some sophistication — enough to know that you can screw with Americans by stirring us up about race and perhaps to see the potential to stoke cynicism about voting among black people.  I guess it is absurd to infer that Russians couldn't reach that modest level of sophistication on their own and another huge leap to get to the idea that Trump must have helped them. But what Democratic Senator suggested that?

The most interesting part of this to me is: If it really is so horrible to stir up racial discord and cynicism about voting, why is it done by so many Americans — Americans who present themselves as virtuous? You can't say those Russians are outrageous if they're just spreading the same message that you yourself have been spreading.

And now, I can see that I'm caught up in a paradox. I seem to be saying that the Democrats have been spreading a message that is damaging to their cause. But the paradox is avoided if you see that the left isn't monolithic. There are people the Democrats would like to think they own, but they don't. If the Russians helped deactivate these would-be Hillary voters, they colluded with Bernie Sanders, not Trump.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 informs me that the greenish text does not relate to the article where it appears. It's a teaser hotlinked to another article! That is, it's not a highlight meant to draw me into the text where it is embedded, but the sort of thing that I'm used to seeing over in a sidebar. Ridiculous! What a stupid squandering of the reader's time and good will.

Okay, here's the other article, which has the title you see in the greenish writing in my screen grab. The Democratic Senator is Richard Blumenthal:

"This micro-targeting required sophistication, knowledge, and a great deal of data and research," Blumenthal told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "And the real question, as you've just asked it, is how did they know how to micro-target?.... There is speculation, to be absolutely blunt, that they received that help from the Trump campaign, which had a great deal of digital information to enable its own targeting," Blumenthal said. "So the question is, was there collusion between this Russian internet agency, a St. Petersburg firm of trolls, and the Trump campaign?"

That is pretty pathetic. I love the way "speculation" simply exists, as if it were an entity, living and breathing and able to concoct conspiracy theories without any human... collusion. And I love the jackassery of claiming to be "absolutely blunt" while avoiding saying who is doing the speculating. Is it him, right there, on Wolf's show?

Why would you need a "great deal of digital information" to find black people in Ferguson and Baltimore? Even if it weren't a matter of common knowledge, isn't Facebook designed to do the targeting for anyone who ponies up the cash to advertise?

"There is a question, I think, among many of my colleagues, whether… an activist conservative can become a judge that is not an activist judge."

"For my vote, I have to have certainty. And I don't know quite how to get it, in view of this record."

Said Senator Dianne Feinstein, questioning Michael Boggs, a Georgia state court judge and former legislator who was nominated by Obama to serve as a federal district court judge.

[As a Georgia legislator,] Boggs had championed an amendment to Georgia's constitution to ban gay marriage, urging his colleagues at the time “to stand up for things that are common-sensical, things that are premised on good conservative Christian values.”...

Boggs had also backed a proposal requiring Georgia physicians to post the number of abortion-related procedures they performed over the last decade online....

[Senator Richard] Blumenthal... said he found it “incredible … that you would not understand that this amendment would put doctors at risk.”

Boggs also voted twice as a state legislator to keep the Confederate battle emblem as part of Georgia’s state flag....

Yikes. Obama nominated him. The Senators now must perform this theater of moderated outrage for the people — their segment of the people who find all of these things hateful.

This is quite a record of bigotry, from the perspective of a voter who's had his political mind prepped by the Democratic Party. Racist, anti-gay, and warring on women — all in one man's 4-year legislative record.

What an irksome problem for Feinstein and the other Democrats in this election year! Apparently Feinstein et al. believe they can get through this with some Judiciary Committee theater around the notion of "judicial activism." Like any legislator, Boggs was a political activist — in his case, an activist for a cause Democrats see fit to call "conservatism."

But every good judge supposedly knows to leave political activism to the political sphere, so if only Boggs intones the usual lines forswearing "activism" and professing dedication to purely legal analysis, then the Senators can recite their lines about how they believe he has adequately demonstrated fealty to judicial values.

Dianne Feinstein wants certainty. You hear that, voters?

But, of course, Feinstein and her co-Democrats do love their activist judges when they are liberal activist judges — whom they do not call activist judges. Senators whip out this "activist judges" label when they think they won't like the direction judges will take in their decisions (whether or not those decisions will rest soundly in legal analysis). Feinstein's question is whether "an activist conservative can become a judge that is not an activist judge." That's the liberal Senator's version of a question that a conservative Senator would phrase as whether "an activist liberal can become a judge that is not an activist judge."

We're very used to this senatorial theater around the word "activist," but perhaps some of the people will find the performances convincing. Is it catharsis yet?