Balancing act: Biden agenda, impeachment
WASHINGTON » A day after the House impeached President Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate were developing plans Thursday to try the departing president at the same time as they begin considering the agenda of the incoming one.
Democrats, poised to take unified power in Washington next week for the first time in a decade, worked with Republican leaders to try to find a proposal to allow the Senate to split time between the impeachment trial of Trump and consideration of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees and his $1.9 trillion economic recovery plan to address the coronavirus.
“It’s far from ideal, no question,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. But, he said, “a dual track is perfectly doable if there is a will to make it happen.”
He said a trial would be straightforward.
“The evidence is Trump’s own words, recorded on video,” Blumenthal said. “It’s a question of whether Republicans want to step up and face history.”
Although Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate majority leader, has privately told advisers that he approves of the impeachment drive and believes it could help his party purge itself of Trump, he refused to begin the proceedings this week while he is still in charge. That means the trial will not effectively start until after Biden is sworn in Wednesday, officials involved in the planning said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has discretion over when to transmit the article of impeachment, formally initiating the Senate proceeding. Some Democrats said she might wait until Jan. 25 or longer to allow more time for the Senate to put in place Biden’s national security team to respond to continued threats of violence from pro-Trump extremists.
With Republicans fractured after the president’s bid to overturn the election inspired a rampage, many of them were trying to gauge the dynamics of a vote to convict Trump. Doing so would open the door to disqualifying him from holding office in the future.
A cautionary tale was playing out in the House, where a faction of Trump’s most ardent allies was working to topple Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, from her leadership post. Cheney had joined nine other members of the party who voted with Democrats to charge the president with “incitement of insurrection.”
Most Senate Republicans stayed publicly silent about their positions. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, one of the president’s leading critics, signaled Thursday that she was among a small group in her party so far considering convicting Trump. In a stinging statement, she called his actions “unlawful,” saying they warranted consequences, and added that the House had acted appropriately in impeaching him.
Though she did not commit to finding the president guilty, saying she would listen carefully to the arguments on both sides, she strongly suggested that she was inclined to do so.
“On the day of the riots, President Trump’s words incited violence, which led to the injury and deaths of Americans — including a Capitol Police officer — the desecration of the Capitol, and briefly interfered with the government’s ability to ensure a peaceful transfer of power,” Murkowski said.
Murkowski joined a small group of other Republicans — including Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins of Maine — who have said they hold the president responsible for the siege and will weigh the impeachment charge. Romney was the only Republican last year to vote to convict Trump when the House impeached him for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate Biden.
McConnell has indicated to colleagues that he is undecided about whether to convict Trump — a stark departure from his outspoken opposition last year to the House’s first impeachment case. He told advisers that he believed the president committed impeachable offenses, though he, too, wanted to hear the arguments at trial.
But it remained unclear whether the 17 Republican senators whose votes would be needed to convict Trump by the requisite two-thirds majority would agree to find him guilty. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., worked feverishly to whip up opposition to a conviction, arguing that it would only further inflame a dangerously divided nation.
With McConnell sending mixed signals about where he would come down, Republican strategists and senior aides on Capitol Hill believed he could ultimately swing the result one way or another.
If the Senate did convict, it could proceed to disqualify Trump from holding office again with only a simple majority vote, a prospect motivating some on both sides.
Senators considering breaking with the president needed to look no further than Cheney to understand the risks.
In a petition being privately circulated among Republicans on Capitol Hill, a group of lawmakers led by Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, chair of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, and Matt Rosendale of Montana, claimed that Cheney’s vote to impeach the president had “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.” It noted that as they argued in favor of charging Trump on Wednesday, Democrats had cited Cheney’s support for impeachment “multiple times.”
“One of those 10 cannot be our leader,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said Wednesday evening in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity,” referring to the group of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. “It is untenable, unsustainable, and we need to make a leadership change.”
Calling hers a “vote of conscience,” Cheney brushed aside calls to step down Wednesday, saying, “I’m not going anywhere.” An unlikely group of hawkish traditionalists and conservative hard-liners have rushed to defend her.
“As we figure out where Republicans go from here, we need Liz’s leadership,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said, praising her for being “unafraid to clearly state and defend her views” even if they were unpopular. “We must be a big-tent party or else condemn ourselves to irrelevance.”
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a member of the Freedom Caucus, said that she “should be commended, not condemned, for standing up in defense of the Constitution and standing true to her beliefs.” Roy has passionately lobbied in favor of terminating the military conflicts in the Middle East; Cheney is a noted hawk.
Cheney was not the only top Republican facing internal criticism, though. Some lawmakers — especially those new to Congress, who have faced hard choices and events during their first days — were privately upset that Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the top two leaders, had provided little guidance about how to approach last week’s votes on overturning Biden’s victory and on the impeachment itself.
In the Senate, leaders were facing a daunting set of questions about the trial with little history to guide them. The House has never impeached a president so close to the end of his term, and no former president has ever been tried in the Senate.
Some Republicans, led by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, pointed to those precedents to argue that the chamber did not have jurisdiction to try Trump, but many legal scholars appeared to disagree.
Democrats faced the vexing task of trying to manage a trial just as Biden will take office and as they claim control of the chamber. Once the House formally sends its article to the Senate, a trial must commence almost immediately, and rules dictate that all other business come to a near immediate halt and remain frozen until a verdict is reached.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, worked Thursday to agree with McConnell on trial rules that could get around those strictures. The goal was to divide the Senate’s days so the chamber could work on confirming members of Biden’s Cabinet and considering his stimulus package in the morning and then take up the impeachment trial in the afternoon.