Mitch McConnell isn't quite ready to bring up outright dismissal of impeachment charged against Donald Trump due to our unfortunate new war with Iran, but he's definitely sandbagging on witnesses and Pelosi is calling him out on it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) bashed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) refusal to commit to Senate impeachment trial witnesses, with a statement Friday that stopped short of suggesting she’d withhold the impeachment articles until he did.
“The American people deserve the truth. Every Senator now faces a choice: to be loyal to the President or the Constitution,” Pelosi said in the statement. “The GOP Senate must immediately proceed in a manner worthy of the Constitution and in light of the gravity of the President’s unprecedented abuses.”
Since the House adopted impeachment articles alleging President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, the Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders have publicly feuded over whether the Senate should agree to call additional witness for its trial when it hashes out a preliminary deal for the other trial procedures.
McConnell, in floor remarks Friday, reiterated his position that the Senate should follow the model of the Clinton impeachment trial, during which the senators did not come to an agreement on witnesses until after the initial stages of the trial were completed.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) meanwhile has accused McConnell of pushing off the witness decision so Republicans could make an end-run around it, and the Democrat is seeking the testimony top administration aides that the White House refused to make available for the House impeachment proceedings.
The night of the House impeachment vote, Pelosi wouldn’t rule out withholding the transmission of the articles until McConnell agreed to a fair trial. She has since downplayed the possibility that she’d delay the articles’ transmission as leverage for securing procedural concessions from McConnell.
Nonetheless, McConnell whacked Pelosi Friday for even flirting with the idea of delaying the transmission, claiming in his floor remarks that the House had developed “cold feet” about its impeachment case after for weeks touting an urgency in the allegations that required the House to move quickly.
Pelosi shot back in her statement that McConnell had “made clear that he will feebly comply with President Trump’s cover-up of his abuses of power and be an accomplice to that cover-up.”
Missing from the blistering statement, however, was any hint that she would hold off on sending the impeachment case to the Senate until McConnell gave in to the Democrats’ demands.
Pelosi is still playing it cool, but I have to say, the Trump regime war propaganda machine is already in full swing with this load of crap from Mike Pence:
Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer place today because Soleimani is gone.— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020
Precisely none of the statements in those two tweets are truthful, and the attack will be used to justify a whole host of things this year.
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