BEVERLY HILLS, January 14, (THEWILL) – U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, on Wednesday said that President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial won’t begin immediately in the Senate and will likely start in earnest following next week’s inauguration.
In a statement shortly after the House voted to impeach Trump for a second time, the Kentucky Republican gave his clearest assessment of the Senate’s upcoming schedule for a trial on whether to convict the president for “incitement of insurrection” following last week’s riots at the Capitol.
McConnell said the process for a trial will begin at the Senate’s “first regular meeting following receipt of the article from the House.”
The Senate is scheduled to come back into session next Tuesday, the day before President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn into office, meaning that’s the earliest the proceedings will begin.
Democrats were hoping for a speedy trial that could start before the Jan. 20 inauguration and had asked McConnell to reconvene the Senate in an emergency session before next week. But McConnell countered that, regardless of when the Senate took up the article of impeachment, the process couldn’t be completed before Trump leaves office next week.
“Given the rules, procedures, and Senate precedents that govern presidential impeachment trials, there is simply no chance that a fair or serious trial could conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in next week.
“Even if the Senate process were to begin this week and move promptly, no final verdict would be reached until after President Trump had left office”, McConnell said
“This is not a decision I am making; it is a fact”, he added.
McConnell further said that Congress and the government should spend the next week “completely focused on facilitating a safe inauguration and an orderly transfer of power” to Biden.
This in effect, rejecting a drive by the chamber’s Democrats to begin the proceedings immediately so Trump could be ousted from office.
McConnell pointed to the timeline of the past three impeachment trials that lasted anywhere from three weeks to nearly three months. Following Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019, the trial, which ultimately acquitted him of high crimes and misdemeanors early last year, lasted 21 days.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that unless McConnell reverses himself and agrees to quickly start, the trial would begin after Jan. 19. That’s a day before Biden is inaugurated as president and about the time Democrats take over majority control of the Senate.
The timetable essentially means McConnell is dropping the trial into Democrats’ laps.
“Make no mistake, there will be an impeachment trial in the United States Senate”, Schumer said. He added, “If the president is convicted, there will be a vote on barring him from running again.”
The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to convict a president, meaning at least 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats to oust Trump. If Trump were convicted, it would take only a simple majority of the Senate to prohibit Trump, who’s mentioned running again in 2024, from holding federal office again.
McConnell will be Washington’s most powerful Republican once Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated.
McConnell is looking out for his party’s future, but moving toward a party divorce from Trump could mean that congressional Republicans will face challenges in GOP primaries.
It is unclear how many Republicans would vote to convict Trump in a Senate trial.
Minutes after the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump, McConnell said in a letter to his GOP colleagues that he’s not determined whether Trump should be convicted in the Senate’s upcoming proceedings.
Complicating GOP thinking about Trump’s second impeachment is that Republicans will be defending 20 of the 34 Senate seats up for election in 2022. Thanks to Democratic victories this month in two Georgia runoffs, Democrats are about to take control of the chamber by 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes.
Speaking out against impeachment Wednesday was Sen. Lindsey Graham, a once-bitter Trump foe. Graham became one of his closest allies during his presidency, then lambasted him over last week’s Capitol invasion but has since spent time with Trump.
Impeaching Trump now would “do great damage to the institutions of government and could invite further violence”, Graham said in a statement. He said Trump’s millions of backers “should not be demonized because of the despicable actions of a seditious mob”, but he did not specifically defend Trump’s actions last week.
“If there was a time for America’s political leaders to bend a knee and ask for God’s counsel and guidance, it is now. The most important thing for leaders to do in times of crisis is to make things better, not worse’, Graham said.
When the Senate voted against removing Trump in February after the House impeached him for pressuring Ukraine to provide political dirt on Biden, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, was the only Republican who cast a vote to oust him.
The House impeachment articles charge that Trump incited insurrection by exhorting supporters who violently attacked the Capitol last week, resulting in five deaths and a disruption of Congress.
Trump has insisted that November’s presidential election was stolen from him by fraud. Those allegations have been rejected by state officials of both parties, state and federal courts and members of his own administration.
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