Impeachment

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, fellow Senators, I come today to talk about the business at hand. Obviously, it is the vote that we are going to take at 4 o'clock this afternoon.

We were subjected to days and days of trial here--many witnesses, witness statements, and all that sort of thing--and it is incumbent upon us now as jurors to reach a conclusion, and I have done so.

I come at this with a little bit of a different view, probably, than others. I have tried more cases, probably, than anyone on the floor, both as a prosecutor and in private practice. So I watched carefully as the case was presented to us and how the case had been put together by the managers from the House. What I learned in the many years of trial experience that I had is that the only way, really, to try a case and to reach where you want to get is to do it in good faith and to do it honestly.

I had real trouble right at the beginning when I saw that the lead manager read a transcript purporting to be a transcript of the President's phone call that has been at issue here, and it was falsified. It was falsified knowingly, willfully, and intentionally. So, as a result of that, when they walked through the door and wanted to present their case, there was a strike there already, and I put it in that perspective.

How the case unfolded after that was stunning because I have never seen a case succeed the way they put the case together. They put the case together by taking every fact that they wanted to make fly and put it only in the best light without showing the other side but more importantly--more importantly--intentionally excluding evidence. Of course, this whole thing centered on witness statements that the President had somehow threatened or pressured the President of Ukraine to do what he was going to do. That simply wasn't the case. The transcript didn't say that.

Now, admittedly, they had a witness who was going around saying that, and they called every person he told to tell us that that was the situation. The problem is, it was hearsay. There is a good reason why they don't allow hearsay in a court of law, and that is, it simply wasn't true.

When the person who was spreading that rumor actually talked to the President about it, the President got angry and said: That is not true. I would never do that.

They never told us that. Once the tape was shown, the House managers spent days putting together that proposition for us. The President's counsel dismantled that in about an hour and did so really quickly. And, as a result of that, simply from a factual basis, it is my opinion that the prosecution in this case did not meet its burden.

Now, much has been said about witnesses and how they did this and what have you, but the Constitution is crystal clear. It gives the House absolute, total, 100-percent control of impeachment; that is, the investigation and the vote on it. It gives us the same thing but on the trial basis.

The thing I think was surprising is that they came over here and tried to tell us how to do their job. I suspect they, in the House, would feel the exact same way about it if we went over there and told them how they should impeach. They came over here and told us how we should do witnesses and all that sort of thing. They had every opportunity to prepare the case. It was totally in their hands. They had as much time as they wanted, and they simply didn't do it. So in that respect, I also found that they came short.

But the bottom line for me, too, is that there is a second reason I would vote to acquit, and that is the stunning attack that this was on the U.S. Constitution. This is really the first time in history when a purely political attack was instigated by reaching to the U.S. Constitution and using what is really a sacred item in that Constitution, a process that the Founding Fathers gave us for good reason, and that is impeachment.

It was not intended to be used as a political bludgeon. It simply wasn't. We had in front of us the Federalist Papers, and we had the debates of the Constitutional Convention. Really, the one silver lining that came out of this was it underscored again for us the genius of the Founding Fathers giving us three branches of government--not just three branches of government but three branches of government that had distinct lanes in which they operated and, most importantly, indicating that they were separate but equal.

They wanted not a parliamentary system like they had looked at from Britain with a head of state that was a Prime Minister who could be removed and changed, as happens all around the world today. They gave us a unique system with three branches of government.

So the Founding Fathers were very clear. They debated the question of what should it take to get rid of the head of state, and they concluded that the second branch of government couldn't be a strong branch of government if, indeed, the President could be removed as a Prime Minister could be removed, simply by Congress getting unhappy with his policies or disagreeing with him. So, as a result of that, they did give us impeachment, and it is a unique process. They were very clear that it was supposed to be used only in very extreme circumstances and not just simply because of a political disagreement or a policy disagreement. And that is exactly what happened here.

The Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention debates are very, very clear that it is not a broad swath of reasons to impeach the President that is given to the first branch of government but, indeed, a very, very narrow swath. It was interesting that, from the beginning, they picked the two words of ``treason'' and ``bribery,'' and to that they then had a long debate about what it would be in addition to that. They had such words as ``malfeasance,'' ``misfeasance,'' ``corruption,'' and all those kinds of things that could be very broad. They rejected all those and said, no, specifically, it had to be ``high Crimes and Misdemeanors.''

So what they did was they narrowed the lane considerably and made it difficult to remove the head of the second branch of government. And then, on top of that, for frosting on the cake, they said it has got to be two-thirds. Now, what did that simply mean? They knew--they knew-- that human beings being the way they are, that human beings who were involved in the political process and political parties would reach to get rid of a political enemy using everything they could. So they wanted to see that that didn't happen with impeachment. So, as a result of that, they gave us the two-thirds requirement, and that meant that no President was going to be impeached without a bipartisan movement.

This movement has been entirely partisan. No Republican voted to impeach him in the House of Representatives. This afternoon at 4 we are going to have a vote, and it is going to be along party lines and, again, it is going to be political.

So what do we have here? At the end of the day, we have a political exercise, and that political exercise is going to fail. And once again--once again--God has blessed America, and the Republic that Benjamin Franklin said we have, if we can keep it, is going to be sustained.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source