Speaker Pelosi is laying the groundwork to not accept the results of the Senate vote before it even happens.
Although it appears that the Senate is about to vote to acquit the President, they haven’t held the vote yet. Still, Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) has decided to push the idea that the Senate trial wasn’t a real trial if it does not have witnesses.
Rumors abound that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) has managed to keep the squishy Republicans to vote with the majority to end the partisan impeachment as early as Friday. In addition, a trio of Democrats at risk in red states, Senators Joe Manchin(WV), Kirsten Sinema(AZ), Doug Jones(AB) are joining their ranks to vote to acquit.
“He will not be acquitted,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared to reporters during her weekly press conference on Thursday.
“You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. You don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation and all of that,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) added. “Does the president know right from wrong? I don’t think so.”
Pelosi then went on to say that she doesn’t think that the President knows right from wrong and that he’s behaving more like a French king than the President of the United States who is restrained by the Constitution.
Pelosi then attacks the President’s legal team implying that they should be disbarred for the statements that they are making in defending the President.
Pelosi’s comments to the media echo the statements that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-NY) has been pushing for weeks — that the Senate trial is biased in favor of President Trump and if he is acquitted the results are not to be accepted.
A trial “without the evidence, without witnesses and documents would render the president’s acquittal meaningless,” Schumer said as the Senate prepares to begin what could be its second-to-last day of proceedings.
The Senate’s vote to acquit Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, he argued, would have a “giant asterisk next to it, because the trial was so rigged in his favor.”
The argument — that Trump cannot be truly exonerated without a fair trial in the Senate — is clearly an attempt to undermine the White House’s victory lap after the president is acquitted, possibly as soon as Friday.
Schumer has been warning for weeks about the consequences of Republicans voting to acquit Trump through a “sham trial” without additional witnesses. But the closer the Senate gets to that possibility, the more Democrats have adopted that message and the sharper it gets.
Source: Politico
This is utterly fascinating spin from the Speaker of the House whose Impeachment Managers just held closed-door impeachment inquiry hearings in the basement and rigged the process against Republicans. They rushed through, didn’t allow due process, refused the Republicans’ witnesses, and have consistently pushed back against the presumption of innocence.
Does this mean that if Democrats believe that the Senate trial was biased and the vote can be dismissed, that if Republicans believe that the House investigations were biased that the vote for impeachment can also be dismissed?
It seems reasonable to me.
Carry on, folks. Nothing has happened in the past few months. Apparently, President Trump has not actually been impeached. Who knew?
