Impeachment

Floor Speech

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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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