[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 3 (Tuesday, January 7, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Page S32]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMPEACHMENT

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, on another matter, every day that the 
House Democrats refuse to stand behind their historically partisan 
impeachment, it deepens the embarrassment for the leaders who chose to 
take our Nation down this road. You can't say we didn't warn them. You 
can't even say they didn't warn themselves.
  It was less than 1 year ago that Speaker Pelosi said: ``Impeachment 
is so divisive . . . unless there's something so compelling and 
overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that 
path.'' That was the Speaker a year ago.
  Back during the Clinton impeachment, it was Congressman Jerry Nadler 
who said: ``An impeachment substantially supported by one of our major 
political parties and largely opposed by the other . . . will lack 
legitimacy.'' Chairman Nadler was right 20 years ago.
  At this point, they may wish they had taken their own advice.
  Instead, what the country got was the most rushed, least thorough, 
and most unfair Presidential impeachment in American history, and now 
the prosecution seems to have gotten cold feet. Nearly 3 weeks after 
the rushed vote they claim was so urgent, they are still debating 
whether or not they even want to see the trial proceed. They voted for 
it 3 weeks ago.
  The House Democrats say they are waiting for some mythical leverage. 
I have had difficulty figuring out where the leverage is. Apparently, 
this is their proposition: If the Senate does not agree to break with 
our own unanimous, bipartisan precedent from 1999 and agree to let 
Speaker Pelosi hand-design a different procedure for this Senate trial, 
then, they might not ever dump this mess in our lap.
  It is one cynical political game right on top of another. It was not 
enough for the House to blow through its own norms and precedents and 
succumb to the partisan temptation of a subjective impeachment that 
every other House had resisted for 230 years. Now it needs to erode our 
constitutional order even further. Those in the House want to invent a 
new, sort of pretrial hostage negotiation wherein the House gets to run 
the show over here in the Senate.
  Meanwhile, they are creating exactly the kind of unfair and dangerous 
delay in impeachment that Alexander Hamilton specifically warned 
against in the Federalist Papers. This is already the longest delay in 
American history between the impeachment vote and the delivery of the 
House's impeachment message. It is almost as though this House Democrat 
majority systematically took all of the Framers' warnings about 
partisan abuses of the impeachment power--took everything the Founders 
said not to do--and thought: Now, there is an idea. Why don't we try 
that?
  Impeaching a President is just about the most serious action that any 
House of Representatives can ever take. How inappropriate and how 
embarrassing to rush forward on a partisan basis and then treat what 
you have done like a political toy. How contemptuous of the American 
people to tell them, for weeks, that you feel this extraordinary step 
is so urgent and then delay it indefinitely for political purposes. How 
embarrassing, but also how revealing.
  Speaker Pelosi's actions over the past 3 weeks have confirmed what 
many Americans have suspected about this impeachment process all 
along--that the House Democrats have only ever wanted to abuse this 
grave constitutional process for partisan ends right from the 
beginning.
  Well, here is where we are. The Senate is not about to let the 
Speaker corrode our own Senate process and precedents in the same way. 
The first organizing registration resolution for the 1999 Clinton trial 
was approved unanimously, 100 to nothing. It left midtrial questions to 
the middle of the trial where they belong.
  If that unanimous bipartisan precedent was good enough for President 
Clinton, it should be our template for President Trump. Fair is fair. 
The Speaker of the House is not going to handwrite new rules for the 
Senate. It is not going to happen.
  Look, these are serious matters. At some point in time, the 
Democrats' rage at this particular President will begin to fade, but 
the sad precedent they are setting will live on. The American people 
deserve a lot better than this.

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