SENATORS SAY proceedings need to wrap up.
WASHINGTON — Arkansas’ two U.S. senators voted Friday not to subpoena witnesses for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, clearing the way for a verdict to be rendered next week.
As their names were called, Republicans John Boozman of Rogers and Tom Cotton of Dardanelle stood and cast their vote.
It’s time, they said afterward, to wrap up the proceedings.
Both said they will vote for acquittal.
“I’ve sat and listened intently for 10 days,” Boozman said. “Both sides have presented their cases, brought forth the evidence that they felt like was important. I feel like we’ve had plenty of time to get the information we need to move forward.”
Cotton said there was no need to call additional witnesses, arguing that the House had already presented sufficient testimony.
“We’ve had 18 witnesses and 28,000 pages of documents. The Democratic House managers have beaten this horse to death. It is time to put this matter to an end, to move on to the people’s business,” he said.
While both lawmakers had sworn an oath to do “impartial justice,” their approaches differed.
Boozman, who initially withheld judgment, rarely left his seat during the proceedings. As both sides made their arguments, he stared intently at the speakers, jotting down notes from time to time.
Cotton, who had labeled the impeachment trial a “sham,” skipped portions of the proceedings, focusing instead on the coronavirus threat. When present, he spent much of his time reading a steady flow of documents that were delivered to his desk.
Along the way, he used the impeachment trial as a fundraising vehicle, sending out appeals. “Sick of impeachment? Time to fight back,” his Friday email stated.
Though their styles differed, the two lawmakers reached the same conclusion. Trump’s conduct, they said, was not grounds for impeachment.
In an interview, Boozman portrayed the initial impeachment inquiry as slipshod and hyper-partisan.
“I think the House did a very poor job of rushing the investigation on their side,” he said. “They wanted to get it done before Christmas to impact the election, and those are not the games that we need to be playing.”
It wasn’t reasonable to ask the Senate to complete the work the House had failed to do, Boozman said.
“When we go into the court of impeachment, it shuts down everything,” he said.
Continuing the proceedings for weeks or months would have cause short-term damage and long-term harm, Cotton said.
“The Senate is paralyzed from doing the people’s business while we sit as a court of impeachment,” Cotton said. “We cannot meet in the morning to do legislative business. We meet late into the evening. We can do nothing besides sit and hear the repetitive arguments.”
Yielding to the House managers’ wishes, Cotton suggested, could have permanently altered the way the government operates.
“If the Senate were to bless the House practices here, a one-sided partisan impeachment with unfair procedures coming over to the Senate and then trying to paralyze the Senate to redo the House’s homework, we could fundamentally reset the relationship between the House and the Senate and the Congress and the president, in ways that would do permanent and lasting damage to the common good of the country,” he said.
While the vote won’t be held until next week, the verdict is no longer in doubt, Boozman suggested.
“I’m voting for acquittal and I think all the rest of the Republicans will, too. I think we actually have a chance to pick up a few Democrats,” he said.
“This has been a partisan process. It needs to end,” Boozman said. “We need to move on and really try to get some good things done for the country during the rest of the year.”
Asked if the call July 25 between Trump and Ukraine’s president had been “perfect” or “inappropriate,” Boozman said, “I don’t think it was perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.”
While it was appropriate to seek an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, the way it was executed was less than optimal, Boozman said.
“Certainly I wouldn’t have handled it that way,” he said.
Cotton, while declining to call the phone call “perfect,” portrayed the criticism as overblown.
“On the list of reasons why we should impeach and remove a president for the first time in our nation’s history, I think most Arkansans would agree, temporarily pausing aid to Ukraine is pretty far down at the bottom,” he said.
While Boozman and Cotton were satisfied with Friday’s vote, pro-impeachment activists portrayed it as a miscarriage of justice.
Heather Graham, a Mountain Home woman who joined Capitol Hill protests earlier this week, said lawmakers had abdicated their responsibilities.
“Without witnesses and documents, this is a cover-up,” she said in a text message. “With this move our Senators are effectively undermining our democratic republic and undoing the Constitution.”