[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 14, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H213-H214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                DE FACTO VETO SETS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa 
(Mr. King) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized and 
address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives.
  I come before you this morning to remind this House and to speak 
about the procedure that is pending in the Senate and some activities 
that need to take place in this House before that is likely to happen, 
and that, of course, is the impeachment of the President of the United 
States.
  It took place December 18, and we will have been waiting nearly a 
month before the Articles of Impeachment would be transferred over to 
the United States Senate which would then begin the enactment of a 
trial--hopefully a fair trial--with an opportunity for the President to 
defend himself over in the United States Senate.
  I was here in this city for 3 days of the impeachment hearings before 
the House Judiciary Committee in 1998 and I was able to observe the 
activities here in this House and how people acted. I will say the 
people who were defending Bill Clinton were not serious outside the 
camera and in the House Judiciary Committee.
  Here we have an impeachment that has been brought forward on two 
different charges and we have watched as from the beginning, from clear 
back in November of 2016, this discussion about impeaching the 
President of the United States began. It began on November 9 when the 
first Democrat stepped up and said: We are going to impeach this 
President.
  We had people who ran for office to get into this Congress who 
announced: We are going to impeach the--I can't put those words into 
this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker.
  So this has been a driven agenda and it began as soon as the other 
side realized that Donald Trump was the duly elected and legitimate 
President of the United States.
  There are two reasons that this impeachment is taking place here. One 
of them is because there is a deep, visceral hatred for Donald Trump 
among the hardcore left in this country that is driving the caucus on 
that side.
  Another reason is because the investigations came about because of 
the weaponization of the executive branch of the United States. I mean 
particularly the Department of Justice and within it the FBI, some of 
the State Department, and much of the intelligence community working 
together to surveil President Trump's campaign operations and then 
President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration activities and 
communications before that and surveillance afterwards.

  Also I mean the circumstances that came about when James Comey took 
information that was proprietary and many say classified and leaked it 
to a professor of Columbia University with directions to leak it to The 
New York Times with the objective of creating a special counsel that 
needed to be Robert Mueller who couldn't have been changed differently 
by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he had recused himself 
from Russia.
  This is the backdrop of this. Impeachment puts a cloud up in front of 
the activities that took place that should appall this Nation at the 
highest level.
  So what I ask, Mr. Speaker, is this: Let's get these Articles of 
Impeachment done in this House this week, let's send them down across 
the rotunda to the United States Senate, and let's ask the Senate then 
to go ahead and work your will under your rules.
  But my ask is this: having lived through this as a witness back in 
1998, we didn't get a clean verdict in the United States Senate. I am 
going from memory here, I didn't look up these articles and the actual 
vote, but I remember this: the public never knew from each Senator 
whether they believed that President Clinton was guilty of the various 
charges that were brought before him. All wrapped in one question was: 
If he is guilty, is he worthy of being removed from office?
  When you package those things together and you had Democratic 
Senators defending Bill Clinton, they said: Well, I didn't have to 
wonder if he was guilty because if he was, it didn't rise to the level 
to remove him from office.
  I would like to know, I think the public wants to know, and I think 
it is

[[Page H214]]

the constitutional duty of the United States Senate to give us a 
verdict:
  Did the President actually obstruct Congress?
  Did he actually abuse power?
  What were the definitions of those things?
  They are not crimes.
  What were the definitions?
  Let's find out the judgment of these Senators, yes or no, guilty or 
not guilty, and then the next question is: Should he be removed from 
office?
  I say not. I didn't see the evidence here. I don't see any crimes, 
and there have been no crimes.
  All it amounts to also is in delaying these Articles of Impeachment 
if the Speaker can block a majority action from the House of 
Representatives, then the Speaker can block every action from the floor 
of the House of Representatives. It is not a sustainable position for 
the Speaker to refuse to message and have a de facto veto because that 
would make the Speaker of the House all-powerful with a veto for any 
piece of action that would come through the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  Let's get this done this week, and I encourage the Senate to get it 
done quickly. I would like to see the President stand here before us at 
the State of the Union address February 4 and be able to announce to 
the world that he has been exonerated by the United States Senate.

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