Impeachment trial in limbo as Senate leaders trade blows

Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer have made zero headway on designing a bipartisan set of rules for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial more than two weeks after their first face-to-face meeting on the matter.

The two leaders gave dueling floor speeches on Friday but held no substantive meeting. In a brief conversation on the floor, Schumer told McConnell to focus on his demands.

“I said to him on the floor: ‘Look Mitch, hope you’re thinking about this. We need documents and we need witnesses,’” Schumer said as he left the Capitol for the day on Friday afternoon.

As the Senate waits for the House to send it impeachment articles, McConnell said the Senate will continue its normal business and immediately moved to set up a vote on Trump's Small Business Administration nominee next week. The House could transmit the articles as soon as next week.

“We are content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate while House Democrats continue to flounder. For now,” McConnell said. “If they ever muster the courage to stand behind their slapdash work product and transmit their articles to the Senate, it will then be time for the United States Senate to fulfill our founding purpose.”

On the Senate floor in an empty Capitol on Friday, the two Senate leaders presented diametrically opposed views of how a Senate trial should go. Majority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) continued making his case for starting a trial and considering witnesses and documents later, while Minority Leader Schumer (D-N.Y.) reiterated that Democrats are unwilling to agree on a trial’s contours without a plan on whether new evidence will be introduced.

The clashing viewpoints increases the possibility that McConnell seeks to build a partisan set of impeachment rules with the votes of 51 of his 53 senators. Though Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have expressed discomfort with McConnell's trial coordination with the White House counsel, neither have endorsed Schumer's approach, either.

Schumer said he has not spoken to either moderate Republican, though he said senators are talking among themselves.

“The American people want a full and fair proceeding. The misgivings expressed by a couple of our colleagues, Sens. Murkowski and Collins, show that the McConnell wall is seeming to crack," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at a press conference back home on Friday.

Schumer continued to raise the prospect of McConnell falling short of a partisan power-play. Any Democrat can force votes on his preferred motions to subpoena new evidence and sounded hopeful that his efforts to force votes on new documents or testimony can succeed with the support of just four GOP senators.

“It may feel like we are no closer to establishing the rules for a Senate trial than when we last met. But the vital question of whether or not we have a fair trial ultimately rest with a majority of the senators in this chamber,” Schumer said.

As he left the building, McConnell declined to lay out what will happen next in the impeachment trial negotiations. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the party will discuss the matter at its full conference meeting on Tuesday.

“We’ll just have to work it out, I mean despite all the rhetoric,” said Roberts, who presided over the Senate as McConnell and Schumer traded jabs. “We could bring back [former Sens.] Phil Gramm and Ted Kennedy, but that might be a little difficult. That’s who made the decision to bring us together” in 1999, when the Senate voted 100-0 to start the trial of Bill Clinton.

Amid the two lengthy speeches, there was no indication either leader has any desire to compromise. Instead, their balky relationship was on full display, with McConnell gleefully dredging up Schumer’s 1998 campaign for his Senate seat as a vote against the removal of former President Bill Clinton.

“He voted against the articles both in the House Judiciary Committee and on the House floor. And a major part of his Senate campaign that year — listen to this — was literally promising New Yorkers in advance that he would vote to acquit President Clinton,” McConnell said with a flourish.

Schumer called McConnell’s speech a collection of “feeble talking points” that included no substantive rebuttal of his calls to hear new evidence. He said McConnell is more comfortable “finger-pointing and name-calling” than rebutting Schumer's requests to hear from acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton on why aid to Ukraine was delayed while Trump sought a Ukrainian probe into Joe Biden.

Finally, Schumer called McConnell’s idea of deciding on new evidence until after House impeachment managers and the president’s counsel deliver opening statements as a “ruse” to block the Senate from hearing any new information about the president’s decision-making.

“If we leave the question of witnesses and documents until after all the presentations are complete, Leader McConnell will argue that the Senate’s heard enough, we shouldn’t prolong the trial any longer,” Schumer said. “He’ll label anyone who wants to subpoena evidence as a partisan who wants to drag the whole affair out.”

Not only are the two leaders at odds over how a trial will play out, the Senate has yet to even establish the basics as Speaker Nancy Pelosi hangs onto appointing impeachment managers and transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Senators don’t know when the trial will begin, how long the debates will last and how the Jan. 14 Democratic presidential debate will go forward in the midst of an impeachment trial.

“I'd just love to know when the trial is going to be. I have a 99-county tour that I would love to get started and planned,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection. “And we need Speaker Pelosi to indicate to us when that's going to happen.”

Though Pelosi has held onto the articles since passing them in December, the Senate was never going to start the trial that month anyway. Instead, her tactics and Schumer’s rhetoric have focused the debate on the process of considering new evidence that the Trump administration has withheld.

Most people in the Capitol believe that phase of the impeachment saga is coming to a head.

“She will send them over. There’s no doubt about that. She’s said she wants to get a better sense of what the trial will look like and try to get assurances that there’s a fair trial,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “McConnell is working hard to rig the trial … we need four Republican senators to call for a fair trial.”

In a statement Friday, Pelosi said McConnell “is doubling down on his violation of his oath” after new emails were revealed this week about the Ukraine saga. She said nothing about the timing of when she will send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.