House Leader Nancy Pelosi has avoided sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate for weeks, and Senate Republicans are tired of the stall tactics.
Politico reports that GOP leaders are finalizing their vote counts at their first party lunch since the holiday break. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said on Tuesday that McConnell’s leadership team is “trying to get consensus among Republicans about how to go forward.”
“What we’re aspiring to do is to get this process moving forward and indicate to the Democrats that as soon as they send those articles over here, we’re ready to go. Quit stalling,” Thune said. “It really undermines the sense of urgency they’ve tried to attach to this from the beginning.”
Thune is absolutely right when it comes to undermining the Democrat’s claims of this being a “constitutional crisis”. By moving forward (which is well within their right as the Senate) they are telling Pelosi, and House Democrats, that the Senate is waiting on them to get this thing started.
McConnell didn’t beat around the bush when it came to how he intends to treat the Trump impeachment trial. “What’s good for President Clinton is good for President Trump,” he said, claiming the Senate will use the same rules that were used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. “51 senators determine what we do.”
The Senate’s unanimous bipartisan precedent from 1999 left witnesses & other mid-trial questions to the middle of the trial. House Democrats may have scrapped their own precedents to hurt President Trump but they do not call the shots in the Senate. pic.twitter.com/S3YVJiivsq
— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) January 6, 2020
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Democrats were quick to condemn McConnell’s words.
“That’s not how you run a country. That’s not how you run the United States Senate,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
“That’s regrettable. If I thought McConnell’s offer to bring witnesses… was in good faith, I could probably vote to proceed with impeachment inquiry. I don’t believe that,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I don’t think he’s going to bring witnesses. I think this is all a whitewash.”
Democrats have one demand that McConnell wisely refuses to give in to: allowing new witnesses to testify in the trial.
For weeks we have heard Democrats and talking heads say that “Republicans won’t allow witnesses,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Democrats, who have the majority in the House, had the ability to subpoena whoever they wanted during the impeachment hearings. Adam Schiff made the excuse that it would have taken too long to go through the legal process of bringing in the witnesses they wanted, but that’s how the process was designed.
What gets left out in the conversation is the judicial branch’s role in all this. Yes, people in the executive branch were subpoenaed, but the House’s role was not to simply move on with impeachment, and hope to get their way in the Senate. Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler, and the rest of them could have gone to the courts to bring these witnesses and documents before their committees, but they didn’t. They said it would take too long, and now they’ve held on to articles of impeachment for nearly three weeks.
Conservative Daily Update 