Now that the House has officially impeached President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, attention has turned to whether Congressional Democrats can get Senate Republicans to provide for a basic fair trial in the Senate. At present, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell (Ky.) have insisted that they’re opposed to even calling witnesses, let alone serving as an “impartial” juror. At a press conference this Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) insisted that she flatly does not care what Republicans ramble on about and will continue advocating for a fair trial — which could include the delay of the transfer of the case until that fairness is guaranteed.
She explained that there’s material ready to pass providing for the next step of the impeachment case — but it’s on hold while Republicans and Democrats in the Senate negotiate a plan for the trial.
As she put it:
‘I’ve said what I’m going to say… Just so you know, there is a bill made in order, by the Rules Committee, that we can call up at any time, in order to send it over to the Senate and to have the provisions in there to pay for the impeachment and then the next step — the trial. That is where you put the managers. I was not prepared to put the managers in that bill yet because we don’t know the arena that we are in. Frankly, I don’t care what the Republicans say.’
Watch:
Republicans have certainly been saying a lot anyway.
Pelosi noted:
‘We would hope there would be a fair process. Just as we hoped they would honor the constitution. I heard some of what Mitch McConnell said today, it reminded me that when they wrote the Constitution, they suspected there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.’
McConnell asserted that Democratic efforts to bring witnesses to the impeachment trial constituted them “searching for ways the Senate could step out of our proper role and try to fix House Democrats’ failures for them.” The failures are not on House Dems — they’re on the president, who has flatly refused to comply with their subpoenas. Trump is the one who muddled the process, and now Republicans (who are supposedly so concerned about the process, despite their explicitly stated refusal to be “impartial”) are blaming Democrats for the mishaps.
McConnell also described Pelosi’s hesitation to submit the case to the Senate without provisions for fairness by saying:
‘Pelosi suggested that House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.’
That simply does not represent the truth. McConnell and the rest of his Republican colleagues have explicitly denied basic fair trial provisions like the production of evidence to test the claims in House Democratic charges. And yet now, after trying to upend the process, he’s complaining about fairness like he’s trying to talk out both sides of his mouth at the same time.
