Following the House’s formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, attention has turned to the Senate trial that’s been teed up, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has delayed transmitting the House’s case to the Senate because of concerns about the Republican majority’s lack of care for fairness. All Pelosi and her colleagues are after is that basic fairness, possibly including provisions like calling witnesses and evidence, but Trump and his allies are freaking out. This weekend on Fox, in a minutes-long unhinged rant, Trump ally and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) veered between claiming that Pelosi is “taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution” with her delay and asserting that the lag is like her playing with a dead cat.
Graham insisted:
‘This is the latest in a series of Constitutional train wrecks orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. During the impeachment process, the president was not allowed to have counsel present during the intel committee… and now that he’s been charged with two articles of impeachment, Nancy Pelosi is denying the president his day in the court in the Senate, and she’s actually trying to tell Mitch McConnell how to run the Senate. She’s trampling on separation of powers.’
He went on to claim that “it’s the Senate’s job to dispose of articles of impeachment passed by the House” rather than Nancy Pelosi’s, but to call his rant a misrepresentation of the truth would be an understatement. For one, it is the House’s job to present their case in the Senate, and they are explicitly hoping to scope out the trial parameters for that presentation instead of rushing in blind. They explicitly and straightforwardly are hoping for fairness — and the president and his allies are absolutely freaking out. At this rate, Graham might as well insist that Pelosi is personally the Antichrist.
He claimed that any Senator who dared to vote in favor of getting testimony from key Trump allies who have refused to testify during the impeachment proceedings so far would be “abusing the Constitutional rights of Donald Trump and putting the presidency at risk.” He railed:
‘When it comes to Schumer and his colleagues, they could care less if they’re trampling on the rights of Donald Trump… To this impeachment debacle, to my Democratic colleagues, impeachment is a dead cat, stop playing with it… Impeachment is a dead cat. Stop playing with it, bury it. It’s going nowhere. Quit violating the Constitution and give the president his day in court. And let’s get this behind us so we can talk about things that people really care about in this country.’
Watch:
To be clear — the country is about evenly split on impeachment. There is no overwhelming public opposition to the process like Trump and his allies have claimed and continue to rattle on about, but at this point, Graham and his colleagues have seemingly drunk deeply of the Trump Kool-aid, so to speak.
He claimed over and over again during his time on Fox that Dems impeached Trump because he dared go to court to challenge their investigations, but that’s simply not true. Trump also flatly declared that he would resist “all the subpoenas,” and the evidence implicating him in a plot to get Biden dirt from Ukraine is straightforward and public.
