Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday said that a trial to decide whether to remove President Trump from office “shouldn’t take that long.”
And the Kentucky Republican also said some senators are really not going to like the process.
Asked by radio show host Hugh Hewitt how long the trial would take, McConnell said: “Well, it shouldn’t take that long. But just one thing that may make senators impatient to get it over with is under the, in an impeachment trial, they can’t speak. They have to sit there quietly and listen. This’ll be good therapy for a number of them.”
McConnell also warned that the impeachment articles expected to pass the House by a straight party-line vote on Wednesday is setting a dangerous precedent.
“This is a political exercise. The words in the Constitution, high crimes and misdemeanors, are misleading in the sense that the founders were having a hard time describing what kind of offense would warrant impeachment,” he said. “The truth of the matter is impeachment is whatever a majority of the House thinks it is at any given moment. Fortunately, over the history of the country, we have only rarely pulled the trigger on impeachment. And I hope the fact that this weak case for impeachment doesn’t mean this is going to become routine in the future.”
Hewitt said that he was “originally in favor of a long trial,” but added he had “been persuaded that that’s a bad mistake. Do you think you’ve persuaded the President of that?”
“Yeah, I think so,” McConnell said. “Look, if you get to a point here where enough is enough, if we go down the witness path, yeah, we’d probably call people that we’d like to hear from. But they’ll be trying to get the Vice President, the Secretary of State, John Bolton, the former national security adviser, and you get the drift. This could go on endlessly. And what we know is how, we know how it’s going to end right now.
“We know the President’s not going to be removed from office. So the question is just how long do we want this to be foisted on the American people? And what I think we ought to do is listen to the arguments, have a period of written questions, and then vote on the two articles of impeachment. And in an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, 51 senators decide everything. It’s a simple majority situation. And as soon as 51 senators decide they’ve heard enough and want to move on, that’s what’ll happen,” the Senate Majority Leader said.
Hours before the House impeachment proceeded to voting on two articles of impeachment, McConnell expressed his wish that Democrats will step back “from the precipice.”
“All eyes today are on the House of Representatives. The country is waiting to see whether these House Democrats will give in to the temptation that every other House in modern history has managed to resist, and misuse the solemn process of impeachment to blow off partisan steam,” he said moments ago on the Senate floor, before urging that a Senate trial take a similar process to that in 1998,” he said.
“I hope House Democrats see reason and pull back from this precipice. But if they proceed, I hope the Democratic Leader and I can sit down soon and honor the template that was unanimously agreed to the last time,” he said.