Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Democrats are “too afraid” to send over the two articles of impeachment they passed in the House Wednesday night and said the Senate would not sanction the House move to eject President Trump.
“There is only one outcome that is suited to the paucity of evidence, the failed inquiry, the slapdash case,” said the Kentucky Republican in a Senate floor speech.
McConnell’s criticism follows House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement, moments after impeaching Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, that House Democrats may not appoint impeachment managers to deliver the two articles to the Senate, which was supposed to hold a trial.
“We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side,” Pelosi, a California Democrat, announced. “So far, we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us.”
McConnell said Pelosi’s announcement shows House and Senate Democrats are seeking ways for the Senate to fix the flawed House impeachment case.
“Speaker Pelosi suggested that House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate,” McConnell said. “It looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet in front of the entire country and second-guessing whether they even want to go to trial.”
McConnell condemned the House Democrats’ “rushed and rigged” impeachment case, arguing there was no impeachable offense discovered to prove the president abused his power or obstructed Congress when he refused to turn over documents or allow testimony from administration officials.
“They tried to cover for their own partisan impatience by pretending that the routine occurrence of a president exerting constitutional privilege is, itself, a second impeachable offense,” McConnell said.
Senate and House Democrats want the Senate to agree to subpoena several top current and former Trump administration officials who refused to testify in the House impeachment investigation, including former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
House Democrats had the option of waiting for a federal court to decide whether the officials must testify but decided to move forward without their testimony to speed up impeachment.
“Every demand simply confirms that House Democrats have rushed forward with a case that is much too weak,” McConnell said.
Pelosi, McConnell said, “promised an ironclad case.”
McConnell said the House impeachment process was cheapened by House Democrats, who, he said, simply want to eject a president they dislike.
“Their slapdash process has concluded in the first purely partisan impeachment since the wake of the Civil War,” McConnell said. “A political faction in the lower chamber has succumbed to a partisan rage.”
