Impeachment

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, it is important to remind ourselves, at moments like this, how unnatural and uncommon democracy really is.

Just think of all of the important forums in your life. Think about your workplace, your family, your favorite sports team. None of them makes decisions by democratic vote. The CEO decides how much money you are going to make. It is not by the vote of your fellow employees. You love your kids, but they don't get an equal say in household matters as mom and dad do. The plays the Chiefs called on their game-winning drives were not decided by a team vote.

No, most everything in our lives that matters, other than the government under which we live, is not run by democratic vote, and, of course, a tiny percentage of humans--well under 1 percent--have lived in a democratic society over the last thousand years of human history.

Democracy is unnatural. It is rare. It is delicate. It is fragile, and untended to, neglected, or taken for granted, it will disappear like ashes that scatter into the cold night.

This body--the U.S. Senate--was conceived by our Founders to be the ultimate guardians of this brittle experiment in governance. We, the 100 of us, were given the responsibility to keep it safe from those who may deign to harm it, and when the Senate lives up to this charge, it is an awesome, inspirational sight to behold.

I was born 3 weeks after Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a taping system in the White House that likely held evidence of President Nixon's crimes, and I was born 1 week after the Senate Watergate Committee, in a bipartisan vote, ordered Nixon to turn over several key tapes.

Now, my parents were Republicans. My mom is still a Republican. Over the years, they have voted for a lot of Democrats and Republicans. They raised me, in the shadow of Watergate, to understand that what mattered in politics wasn't really someone's party. It was whether you were honest and decent and if you were pursuing office for the right reasons.

In the year I was born, this Senate watched a President betray the Nation, and this Senate--both Democrats and Republicans--stood together to protect the country from this betrayal. This is exactly what our Founders envisioned when they gave the Congress the massive responsibility of the impeachment power. They said to use it sparingly, to use it not to settle political scores but to use it when a President has strayed from the bonds of decency and propriety.

The Founders wanted Congress to save the country from bad men who would try to use the awesome power of the executive branch to enrich themselves or to win office illicitly, and I grew up under the belief that, when those bad men presented themselves, this place had the ability to put aside party and work to protect our fragile democracy from attack.

This attack on our Republic that we are debating today, if left unchecked, is potentially lethal. The one sacred covenant that an American President makes with the governed is to use the massive power of the executive branch for the good of the country, not for personal financial or political benefit. The difference between a democracy and a tin-pot dictatorship is that, here, we don't allow Presidents to use the official levers of power to destroy political opponents. Yet that is exactly what President Trump did, and we all know it. Even the Republicans who are going to vote to acquit him today admit that. If you think that our endorsement through acquittal will not have an impact, then, just look at Rudy Giuliani's trip to Ukraine in December, which was in the middle of the impeachment process. He went back, looking for more dirt, and the President was ringing him up to get the details before Giuliani's plane even hit the gate. The corruption hasn't stopped. It is ongoing. If this is the new normal--the new means by which a President can consolidate power and try to destroy political opponents--then we are no longer living in America.

What happened here over the last 2 weeks is as much a corruption as Trump's scheme was. This trial was simply an extension of Trump's crimes--no documents, no witnesses. It was the first-ever impeachment trial in the Senate without either. John Bolton, in his practically begging to come here and tell his firsthand account of the President's corruption, was denied--just to make sure that voters couldn't hear his story in time for them to be able to pressure their Senators prior to an impeachment vote.

This was a show trial--a gift-wrapped present for a grateful party leader. We became complicit in the very attacks on democracy that this body is supposed to guard against. We have failed to protect the Republic.

What is so interesting to me is that it is not like the Republicans didn't see this moment coming. In fact, many of my colleagues across the aisle literally predicted it. Prior to the President's election, here is what the Republican Senators said about Donald Trump.

One said:

He is shallow. He is ill-prepared to be Commander in Chief. I think he is crazy. I think he is unfit for office.

Another said:

The man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies.

Yet another Republican Senator said:

What we are dealing with is a con artist. He is a con artist.

Now, you can shrug this off as election-year rhetoric, but no Democrat has ever said these kinds of things about a candidate from our party, and prior to Trump, no Republican had said such things about candidates from their party either. The truth is the Republicans, before Trump became the head of their party, knew exactly how dangerous he was and how dangerous he would be if he won. They knew he was the archetype of that bad man the Founders intended the Senate to protect democracy from.

That responsibility seems to no longer retain a position of primacy in this body today. The rule of law doesn't seem to come first today. Our commitment to upholding decency and truth and honor is not the priority today. In the modern Senate today, all that seems to matter is party. What is different about this impeachment is not that the Democrats have chosen to make it partisan. It is that the Republicans have chosen to excuse their party's President's conduct in a way that they would not have done and did not do 45 years ago. That is what makes this moment exceptional.

Now, Congressman Schiff, in his closing argument, rightly challenged the Democrats to think about what we would do if a President of our party ever committed the same kind of offense that Donald Trump has. I think it was a very wise query and one that we as Democrats should not be so quick on the trigger to answer self-righteously.

Would we have the courage to stand up to our base, to our political supporters, and vote to remove a Democratic President who had chosen to trade away the safety of the Nation for political help? It would not be easy. No, the easy thing to do would be to just do what is happening today--to box our ears, close our eyes, and just hope the corruption goes away.

So I have thought a lot about this question over these past 2 days, and I have come to the conclusion that, at least for me, I would hold the Democrats to the same standard. I would vote to remove. But I admit to some level of doubt, and I think that I need to be honest about that because the pressures today to put party first are real on both sides of the aisle, and they are much more acute today than they were during Watergate.

It is with that reality as context that I prepare to vote today. I believe that the President's crimes are worthy of removal. I will vote to convict on both Articles of Impeachment.

But I know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Ours is an institution built to put country above party, and today we are doing, often, the opposite. I believe within the cult of personality that has become the Trump Presidency, the disease is more acute and more perilous to the Nation's health on the Republican side of the ledger, but I admit this affliction has spread to all corners of this Chamber.

If we are to survive as a democracy--a fragile, delicate, constantly in need of tending democracy--then this Senate needs to figure out a way after today to reorder our incentive system and recalibrate our faiths so that the health of one party never ever again comes before the health of our Nation.

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