House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats behind closed doors Tuesday that the she would continue to hold the passed articles of impeachment back from the upper chamber until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered details on how a trial will be conducted.
Pelosi’s comments as reported by the Washington Post showcase the Democrats’ latest power grab to bend the impeachment proceedings in the Senate to their will demanding the testimony of new witnesses.
After the House passed two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress by an almost uniform partisan vote, Pelosi announced she would be withholding the articles from moving forward to the Senate.
Pelosi’s decision to bring a halt to the impeachment process comes as Democrats aim to amp up pressure on Republicans to conduct the trial in the Senate on the Democrats’ terms even after operating an unfair process rushed in the House.
The impeachment proceedings lodged against President Donald Trump were kicked off by an anonymous whistleblower complaint alleging Trump conspired with the Ukrainian president to interfere in the next U.S. presidential election. The complaint, marked credible and urgent by the intelligence community inspector general but not by the Department of National Intelligence sparked rampant speculation by impeachment-hungry Democrats and the mainstream media as a smoking gun to end the Trump presidency.
Soon after knowledge of the complaint surfaced in the media however, the White House declassified and released an unredacted transcript of the July 25 phone call in question under the complaint between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Democrats have tried incessantly to paint the call as damning evidence illustrating that Trump invited Ukraine to get involved in the next election by investigating the Biden family in exchange for nearly $400 million in military aid. The withheld aid was ultimately released without a Ukrainian investigation.
In reality, a true and honest reading of the transcript exposes an American president urging the Ukrainian leader to root out corruption in the eastern European nation and requesting that Zelensky investigate the origins of Ukraine’s peddling of the Russian collusion hoax in the United States.
In more than two months of rushed proceedings, Democrats failed to unearth evidence worth of a “high crime and misdemeanor,” that warrants the extreme measure of impeachment despite the entire process run in the lower chamber being slanted to disadvantage Republicans. To the contrary, the Democrats’ own witnesses exonerated Trump of any wrongdoing regarding Ukraine.
Democrats impeached the president anyway, and now Democrats are demanding the Senate call additional witnesses to prolong the process and find the incriminating evidence to oust Trump from the Oval Office. Incriminating evidence will be hard to find however, as the House hearings exposed to the public, there isn’t any.
Pelosi’s present play to prohibit the process from moving onward has further undercut the entire premise of a rushed procedure in the House, which sought to remove the president from office as quick as possible citing Trump’s hold on power as an urgent threat to the survival of the republic.
McConnell has made clear his desire for a fair and quick trial in the Senate and has pushed back on Democratic demands to call more witnesses to prolong a process that has been a sham from the start launched in a desperate effort to reverse the results of the 2016 election.
Republican Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham proposedchanging the Senate rules regarding impeachment altogether to remove Pelosi from the process and begin the trial proceedings without the House speaker’s approval.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, joined by a dozen Republican senators has proposed dismissing the impeachment trial altogether.