A group of Republicans want to change Senate rules to allow a vote to dismiss impeachment articles against President Trump.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has so far remained silent on the proposal while separately advocating lawmakers stick to “precedent.”
Missouri Republican Josh Hawley has so far attracted 10 GOP co-sponsors for a resolution that would change the Senate rules and permit lawmakers to vote on a motion to dismiss impeachment charges even though the House has not sent over the articles.
The measure is meant to undo the leverage House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to gain by withholding articles of impeachment until Senate Republicans agree to a list of witnesses from the Trump administration.
The Hawley resolution would amend the Senate’s rules for conducting an impeachment trial to allow the Senate to dismiss the charges “for lack of prosecution” on any articles the House hasn’t sent to the Senate for 25 days or longer.
The House passed two articles of impeachment nearly three weeks ago that charge President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Hawley said on Monday his proposal “will set a time limit,” backdated to Dec. 19, when the House passed the articles without a single GOP vote.
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has not registered public support for the measure, and a spokesman said he had no information to provide on McConnell’s perspective.
John Barrasso of Wyoming and Joni Ernst of Iowa, who are on McConnell’s leadership team, are co-sponsors of the proposal.
Democrats want documents and testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and two other officials who have information about Trump’s decision to temporarily block security aid to Ukraine.
“I believe a fair trial is one that considers all the relevant facts that allow for relevant witnesses and documents,” Schumer said on Monday. “That is a feature of every single impeachment trial of a president in the history of our nation.”
Republicans accused House Democrats of rushing a vote on weak impeachment evidence only to demand the Senate continue the proceedings with more witness testimony.
“If Speaker Pelosi is afraid to try her case, the articles should be dismissed for failure to prosecute, and Congress should get back to doing the people’s business,” Hawley said Monday.
McConnell, however, has declared he wants to stick to precedent, first.
In a floor speech on Monday, McConnell called on the Senate to follow the rules agreed on during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999.
In that instance, lawmakers unanimously agreed to hear opening arguments from House prosecutors as well as White House defense lawyers before voting on witnesses.
“House Democrats’ hunger to break our Senate precedents, just like they broke their own House precedents, could not be more telling,” McConnell said on Monday. “But the Senate does not just bob along on the currents of every news cycle. The House may have been content to scrap their own norms to hurt President Trump, but that is not the Senate.”
McConnell is generally reluctant to alter long-standing Senate rules. He made an exception in 2017, when Democrats threatened to filibuster Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch. McConnell employed the “nuclear option” to change Senate rules, meaning through a narrow partisan vote rather than with a supermajority, to allow a simple majority to cut off Senate debate on high court nominees, meaning that appointees can be confirmed with 51 votes instead of 60.
When it comes to the impeachment trial, however, McConnell appears content to wait out Pelosi on the articles.
But there is a growing demand from Trump’s GOP Senate allies to change the rules to allow the Senate to dismiss them.
“Since the start of the impeachment process, Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats have made a mockery of our Constitution and abused impeachment for political gain,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said Monday. “Now, they’re undermining the role of the Senate by attempting to dictate the terms of the Senate’s trial. Under our Constitution, the Senate has the sole authority to try impeachment. It is the Senate’s duty to take up these articles without delay and to resolve them in a timely and constitutionally appropriate manner.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures that if Pelosi holds onto the articles much longer, “I would work with Sen. McConnell to change the rules of the Senate so we could start the trial without her, if necessary.”
Graham said he would act in “days, not weeks.”
