Directing Certain Committees to Continue Ongoing Investigations Into Whether Sufficient Grounds Exist for the Impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, Mr. Cole, for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this resolution.

Unfortunately, we have seen, since the day that President Trump was inaugurated, some people who made it public that they wanted to impeach him--not because there are high crimes and misdemeanors, which is the constitutional standard, but just because they don't agree with the results of the 2016 election.

That, Madam Speaker, is not why you impeach a president. There is precedent.

This has only happened three times in the history of our country. Every time, it not only started with a full vote of the House, but it also started with actual fairness. We are not getting that fairness today.

When you look through this resolution, in multiple places, it gives veto authority by the chair to literally reject any witness who is brought forward by the minority. So no rights for the minority unless the chair so designates.

In fact, in this resolution, it allows the chair to veto even the ability for the President to have legal counsel in the room. If the chair chooses, at his whim, they can literally kick out the President's legal counsel.

This is unprecedented. It is not only unprecedented, this is Soviet- style rules.

Maybe in the Soviet Union you do things like this: where only you make the rules, where you reject the ability for the person you are accusing to even be in the room to question what is going on, for anybody else to call witnesses, when only one person has the right to call witnesses.

And as we saw just the other day, the chairman was literally directing the witness to not answer certain questions by the Republicans. What kind of fairness is that?

Maybe you think it is fairness if you can run roughshod over somebody because you have got the votes, but that is not how impeachment was supposed to go. In fact, Alexander Hamilton himself, during the debate on the Constitution, in the Federalist Papers, warned of days like this, that the greatest danger is that the decision on impeachment ``will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.'' Alexander Hamilton warned about days like today.

This is not what we should be doing, clearly, when you ask the American people, who know that they are paying higher drug prices and they see that there is legislation, bipartisan legislation, to lower drug prices that won't come to this floor because of the infatuation with impeachment.

We don't even have a bill to formally pay our troops and make sure they have the tools they need to defend this country because there is such an infatuation with impeachment.

Madam Speaker, when you look through this resolution, you see how one-sided, how Soviet-style this is running. This is the United States of America. Don't run a sham process, a tainted process like this resolution ensures.

It ought to be rejected, and I think you will see bipartisan rejection of this resolution.

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