Impeachment impasse puts trial in doubt

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders wrangled on Friday over the terms of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, deepening their impasse and throwing the start date further into doubt amid disputes over whether to call witnesses or introduce documentary evidence.

In a pair of barbed backto-back speeches on the Senate floor, the top Republican and the top Democrat traded charges of hypocrisy and unfair dealing, settling nothing in the high-stakes fight over the shape of the constitutional proceeding that will decide Trump’s fate.

The feuding on the first day of a new legislative session indicated that two weeks of holiday respite had done little to break a logjam.

“Their turn is over,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, said Friday of House Democrats. “They have done enough damage. It is the Senate’s turn now to render sober judgment as the framers envisioned.”

With no meeting between the Senate leaders scheduled, nor any indication of when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) might send the articles, lawmakers and aides privately warned that the stalemate could stretch on into mid-January.

McConnell, conceding that his chamber could not act without the House acting first, said Republicans would simply turn back to their regular legislative work while they waited, “content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate while House Democrats continue to flounder.”

Stepping onto the Senate floor moments after McConnell, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused the president’s party of trying to steamroller his acquittal.

“We are not asking for critics of the president to serve as witnesses in the trial,” Schumer said. “We are asking only that the president’s men, his top advisers, tell their side of the story. And Leader McConnell has been unable to make one argument — one single argument — as to why these witnesses and these documents should not be part of a trial.”

Democrats have argued that in light of Trump’s blanket defiance of the House’s impeachment inquiry, the trial must include new evidence to be fair, and they want a commitment up front. McConnell vehemently disagrees, though on Friday he did not rule out calling witnesses. He asked instead for the Senate to follow the precedent of the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, when lawmakers agreed to open the proceedings without an agreement on whether to call witnesses.