Radio Recap – Senate Majority Leader on Impeachment: Let’s Quit the Charade

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on impeachment: Let’s quit this charade.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live we discussed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments on Speaker Pelosi holding back the articles of impeachment from going to the U.S. Senate.

Majority Leader McConnell said on Fox News today:

Let’s quit the charade. This is a political exercise . . . a political exercise. All I’m asking of Schumer is that we treat Trump the same way we treated Clinton.

Senator McConnell continued:

She [Pelosi] apparently believes that she can tell us how to run the trial. Look, what I’ve been advocating to Senator Schumer is exactly the same way that we handled the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago, which he voted for.

Quit the charade, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That’s the strong message that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered. On Friday we talked about options that could be available to the U.S. Senate. One of the options would be that maybe the President hasn’t been impeached because there had been no House managers named and the House has not yet delivered the impeachment articles to the U.S. Senate.

On Friday we told you that we’d continue to analyze these options. I even talked about them on Fox & Friends on Saturday morning.

There was another option that the Senate under the Constitution could just move forward with a trial. Now, as we did our research, the Constitution would certainly allow that because the Senate has the sole power to try impeachment. They could move forward, but they would have to do a pretty significant rule change in the Senate.

ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett made the following point:

To change the standing rules of the Senate, it requires a two-thirds vote. That’s sixty seven votes. Now there’s always a debate when it comes down to the standing rules of the Senate as to whether or not it’s a reinterpretation of existing rules. We have seen this on a number of issues. I can think about it during the reconciliation process. I can think about it when lowering the threshold for confirming federal judges. There is some room for debate even on that measure but I think that most in Senate would believe that this would be a change to the standing rules of the Senate so it would require sixty seven votes.

As always, you can listen to the entire episode with our full analysis here.