The Senate is heading for a nail-biter vote on whether to call additional witnesses or to end this impeachment trial once and for all.

The senator and I sit down in daylight for a change to get his strategy before he heads to Capitol Hill.

This is verdict with Ted Cruz.

Welcome back to verdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles, senator.

I don't remember the last time I saw you in daylight.

Well, hopefully the sun shining indicates we're near the end of the journey.

I want to get your thoughts on the likelihood of that. I want to get your strategy on the last of questions today.

There are some reports coming out that John Barrasso, the number three Republican in the Senate,

says that the momentum is heading in the direction of not calling additional witnesses.

There are other reports that we might get a 50-50 vote perfectly split in which case I want to know who breaks the tie.

It's an open question. It is close right now.

We need 51 votes to definitively say the trial is done. We don't need additional witnesses.

Let's move on to final judgment. If we have 51 votes, we can wrap this up in the next couple of days.

If we don't, and I hope the momentum is going that way, as we talked about in the last podcast, I think there are at least two Republicans who are pretty clearly going to vote with the Democrats, Mitt Romney and Susan Collins.

That means they have 49 votes.

There are the two next most likely, or Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, I don't know where they're going to be.

They're holding their cards very close to the vest. They could end up on either side of that.

I think they're considering it carefully. They seem to be genuinely struggling with this decision.

If it ends up 50-50, we're in a little bit of uncharted territory.

Under the scheduling order we adopted, I think Republican leadership's argument would be 50-50 means witnesses are not in order.

In other words, let's move on.

Right.

...