After the House voted to impeach President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said the Democrats may wait to send the Senate the Articles of Impeachment to try to exert pressure on the Senate at to impeachment trial rules.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed Pelosi and the Democrats on the floor this morning.
McConnell tore into Pelosi and the Democrats over the possible delay:
McConnell will lambaste the impeachment from the Senate floor as “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair … in modern history,” according to excerpts of his floor remarks released ahead of the speech.—McConnell will say those articles are “fundamentally unlike any articles that any prior House of Representatives has ever passed” and the idea Democrats will withhold the articles suggests “House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.””The framers built the Senate to provide stability,” McConnell will say. “To keep partisan passions from boiling over. Moments like this are why the United States Senate exists.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also lashed out at Pelosi:
Trump responded:
Pelosi claimed the delay would happen because she fears the GOP-controlled Senate “are incapable of holding a fair trial.”
From Fox News:
Pelosi was then asked about possibly withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate until they get certain reassurances, and the Speaker refused to give a direct answer.”Again, we’ll decide what that dynamic is, but we hope that the resolution of that process will be soon in the Senate,” she said.Pelosi proceeded to read a statement from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about impeachment procedure and used it as an example of what she considers to be an unfair process.”Let me tell you what I don’t consider a fair trial,” she told the crowd of reporters. “This is what I don’t consider a fair trial — that Leader McConnell has stated that he’s not an impartial juror, that he’s going to take his cues, in quotes, from the White House, and he is working in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.”She finally deferred to the Senate as the final arbiter of Trump’s fate and accused the president of withholding vital documents from Congress.”It’s up to the senators to make their own decision working together, hopefully in recognition of their witnesses that the president withheld from us, their documents that the president withheld from us and we would hope that that information would be available in a trial to go to the next step. Because that’s another level in terms of conviction, in terms of this,” Pelosi said. “But right now the president is impeached.”
Pelosi said the timing to hand over the articles “would ultimately be a joint decision between the House and Senate.”
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