Maybe Democrats should stop "agonizing"

Senate Republicans see the special counsel’s report — with its stark evidence that President Trump repeatedly impeded the investigation into Russian election interference — as a summons for collective inaction.

Republicans in the upper chamber, who would serve as Mr. Trump’s jury if House Democrats were to impeach him, reacted to the report’s release with a range of tsk-tsk adjectives like “brash,” “inappropriate” or “unflattering.” Only Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called out the president’s behavior as “sickening.”

Yet no Republican, not even Mr. Romney, a political brand-name who does not face his state’s voters until 2022, has pressed for even a cursory inquiry into the findings by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that the president pressured senior officials, including the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II and the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, to scuttle his investigation. Where Democrats see a road map to impeachment, Republicans see a dead end.

“I consider this to be, basically, the end of the road,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who once tried to thwart Mr. Trump’s presidential nomination and now serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has the authority to investigate Mr. Mueller’s findings.

“There is no question that some of these revelations are unflattering,” Mr. Lee said in an interview on Wednesday. “But there is a difference between unflattering and something that can and should be prosecuted.”

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, has been as critical in private of Mr. Trump’s actions as Mr. Romney has been in public, but he, too, said it was time to move on.

“While the report documents a number of actions taken by the president or his associates that were inappropriate, the special counsel reached no conclusion on obstruction of justice,” Mr. Portman said in a statement.

That is factually accurate; in releasing his findings a week ago, Mr. Mueller laid out about a dozen instances in which the president may have obstructed justice, but he left it to Congress to reach that conclusion, counseling “that Congress has authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority.” House Democrats responded by ramping up committee investigations, kicking off what is likely to be a long, rending intraparty debate over impeachment.

Senate Republicans saw Mr. Mueller’s invitation in far more cynical terms, as a quintessential Washington punt of responsibility, according to aides and political consultants. One senior aide to a Senate Republican put it this way: If the most respected law enforcement official of his generation did not have the temerity to accuse Mr. Trump of obstructing justice, why should they?

“The Republican Party, and the Senate, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist based in Florida who has been a sharp critic of Mr. Trump’s. “Occasionally, a few guys in the Senate will furrow their brows, but it will never be backed up by action. They wake up every day and pray, ‘Please, God, don’t let Trump be mean to me on Twitter.’”

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged the Republicans on the panel to investigate the report’s findings. “The report makes a strong case for obstruction of justice,” she said on Thursday. “Congress has both the constitutional duty and authority to investigate the serious allegations laid out in the Mueller report. We need to understand not only the president’s actions, but also why he was so determined to conceal the truth from investigators and the public.”

In the short term, the Senate will provide a backdrop for the next big public event in the Mueller story, with Attorney General William P. Barr set to testify about the report next Wednesday before the Judiciary Committee. Next week, a bipartisan group of eight Senate and House leaders are scheduled to review an unredacted version of Mr. Mueller’s findings when they return from their spring recess.

If either event brings anything new to light, Republican leaders may have to recalibrate, but they do not expect that to happen.

An investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election is still continuing, but that, too, may have been compromised by the special counsel’s work; Mr. Mueller’s report found that the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, “appears to have” sent “information about the status of the F.B.I. investigation” to the White House.

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, said he had no plans to investigate — and has even suggested that if he pursues a new inquiry it would be to focus on allegations that federal law enforcement agencies conducted surveillance of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

“I’m all good. I’m done with the Mueller report,” Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told CNN this week.

That sense of finality was echoed by Republican senators who are considerably less inclined to take Mr. Trump’s side, including Mr. Portman, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who in private have all harshly criticized Mr. Trump’s conduct of his presidency, according to aides.