The U.S. Senate’s top Republican exhorted fellow senators on Tuesday to acquit President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, warning that the fate of the republic depended on it, even as his Democratic counterpart accused Republicans of a cover-up.
The partisan rancor in the dueling speeches by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer underscored the wider polarization in the country over Trump’s impeachment on charges arising from his dealings with Ukraine.
McConnell urged the Senate, which is controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans and is expected to acquit Trump in a vote on Wednesday, to stop what he called the Democrats’ abuse of power in impeaching Trump in the House of Representatives.
The House impeached Trump on Dec. 18 on charges of abuse of power for asking Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter and obstruction of Congress for blocking testimony and documents sought in the investigation.
“We must vote to reject the House abuse of power, vote to protect our institutions, vote to reject new precedents that would reduce the framers’ design to rubble, vote to keep factional fever from boiling over and scorching our republic,” McConnell said.
Schumer said the president himself, not impeachment, was the threat to democracy in the United States and that in blocking Democratic efforts to hear witnesses in Trump’s trial, Republicans were “hiding the truth.”
McConnell expressed surprise at the Democrats’ decision to impeach Trump, saying that his acquittal was always assured. A two-thirds vote is needed in the Senate to remove Trump from office and his fellow Republicans occupy 53 of the 100 seats.
Trump has drawn almost uniform support among Republican senators though several have called his actions wrong and inappropriate.
McConnell echoed the arguments made by Trump’s legal team that Democrats were seeking to annul the 2016 election in which Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“Washington Democrats think President Donald Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor the moment – the moment – he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. That is the original sin of this presidency – that he won and they lost,” McConnell said.
The Constitution allows for the removal of a president for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” McConnell said he did disagree with the view offered by Trump’s legal team that a president cannot be impeached without a violation of statutory law.
Senators on Tuesday were delivering a series of speeches explaining how they will vote.
Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, running for re-election in a state Trump won in 2016, said he would vote to convict, saying the facts were clear.
“Tomorrow, by refusing to hold President Trump accountable for his abuses, Republicans in the Senate are offering him unbridled power without accountability and he will gleefully seize that power,” Peters said.
Trump is running for re-election in the Nov. 3 election. Biden, the former U.S. vice president, is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump. Besides aiming to unseat Trump, Democrats hope to keep their House majority and seize control of the Senate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, said that even if the Senate votes to acquit the president as expected, Democrats have succeeded in uncovering Trump’s actions that they argue make him unfit for office or re-election.
“Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever. And now these senators, though they don’t have the courage to assign the appropriate penalty, at least are recognizing that he did something wrong,” Pelosi told the New York Times.
(Reporting by Susan Cornwell, David Morgan, Makini Brice, Richard Cowan, Lisa Lambert, Patricia Zengerle and Susan Heavey; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Ross Colvin)
