Idaho Republican Jim Risch reportedly fell asleep today during Trump’s removal trial

Maybe he should just retire so he can have ample time for siestas?

Via The Wash­ing­ton Post:

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic case to sub­poe­na the State Depart­ment didn’t make much of an impres­sion on one key Repub­li­can sen­a­tor, James E. Risch of Ida­ho, who appeared to be asleep for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of it.

Short­ly after 5:30 PM Risch — chair­man of the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, which over­sees the State Depart­ment — could be seen from the press gallery motion­less, with his eyes closed and head slumped against his right hand.

Risch was the first law­mak­er seen by Wash­ing­ton Post reporters to clear­ly have fall­en asleep, about four hours after the tri­al pro­ceed­ings began Tues­day. When [Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Val] Dem­ings cued up video of tes­ti­mo­ny from U.S. Ambas­sador to the Euro­pean Union Gor­don Sond­land, Risch briefly perked up, but quick­ly closed his eyes again.

The appar­ent snooze end­ed about fif­teen min­utes lat­er, at 5:52 PM, after Dem­ings sum­ma­rized anoth­er video clip.

Grant­ed, it’s been a very long day of pro­ceed­ings in the Senate.

But that’s the for­mat that Repub­li­cans chose. They are cur­rent­ly in the major­i­ty. They drew up the sched­ule for this tri­al and draft­ed the rules of pro­ce­dure to be pre­sent­ed to the Sen­ate for its consideration.

The Ida­ho States­man, the Gem State’s news­pa­per of record, also shared the above report with their read­ers in an arti­cle pub­lished on the front page.

Risch, sev­en­ty-six, is a for­mer gov­er­nor and lieu­tenant gov­er­nor of Ida­ho with an arch­con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ing record. He has served in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate for eleven years, suc­ceed­ing fel­low Repub­li­can Lar­ry Craig, who became infa­mous after being arrest­ed in a Min­neapo­lis air­port bath­room stall in 2007.

Risch is a major ally of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion (NRA) and reli­ably votes in lock­step with Mitch McConnell and Don­ald Trump on pret­ty much every­thing. If you look at the archives of Last Week In Con­gress, you can see that Risch is aligned with Trump and McConnell near­ly one hun­dred per­cent of the time.

The Sen­ate, as of the time this post was writ­ten, was still in the mid­dle of debat­ing a series of amend­ments offered by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus to the tri­al rules of pro­ce­dure. The fifty-three Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have defeat­ed the first four amend­ments to be offered by the Democ­rats so far.