Ever since the House voted to impeach Trump on December 18, Nancy Pelosi has refused to send the two impeachment articles to the Senate for a vote. She has wanted just one simple thing from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell … an assurance of a fair trial.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has apparently had enough of Pelosi’s “political stunt.” He has given her until sundown to get out of town.
Graham’s ultimatum to Pelosi is this … if she does not deliver impeachment articles against Trump to the Senate by the end of the week, the Senate should “take matters in our own hands.”
“What I would do, if she continues to refuse to send the articles as required by the Constitution, I would work with Senator McConnell to change the rules of the Senate so we could start the trial without her, if necessary,” Graham proposed.
Now isn’t that just peachy? So simple … so Republican!
You have to hand it to GOPers, they are masters at the the art of political cheating. If they don’t like rules, they change them. If they don’t like laws, they ignore them!
This is what actually came out of Graham’s mouth:
“Well, we’re not going to let Nancy Pelosi use the rules of the Senate to her advantage. This is dangerous to the presidency as an institution. They impeached the president, but the speaker of the House is holding the articles back, trying to extort from the majority leader of the Senate a trial to her liking. They’re trying to hold these articles over the head of the president.”
So Nancy Pelosi is using the current rules of the Senate to extort a promise of a fair trial? What gall, what brazenness!
Unfortunately for Graham, it’s unlikely Republican senators would vote for such a radical move.
According to Rachael Bade of the Washington Post, “Senate rules suggest such a move would be difficult, if not impossible. It would take 60 votes to pass a resolution on impeachment outside a trial and 67 votes to change the impeachment rules. That threshold would require Democratic support, since McConnell has only 53 Republicans — and Democrats would be loath to undercut Pelosi.”
But with Graham, McConnell and all the other Republican sycophants in the Senate, is anything really beyond the realm of possibility?
Photo | Joshua Roberts/Reuters, nationalreview.com
Sloane Charles says
The Repugs have no shame. They will lie, cheat, deflect and do or say anything in their loathsome brain to support this vermin, cretin of a President. It’s so sad that our democratic republic has turned into a third world banana republic in such a short time.
Graham, turtlehead, Jordan, Nunes and their ilk should all be strung up as traitors to our country.
John DeProspo says
I like your solution to the problem!