Posted on 12/19/2019 2:20:29 PM PST by Kaslin
RUSH: Chicago. Steve, great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Just a quick question. Is it possible for Nancy Pelosi to withhold articles of impeachment from the Senate until after the 2020 election, wait for a possible Democratic win, then submit?
RUSH: I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. This is uncharted territory for a lot of people. The idea of holding these articles until after 2020 — you’re presuming Trump’s reelected?
CALLER: Yes. Of course. Yeah.
RUSH: My off-the-cuff answer to this is gonna be that unless specified, like legislation, an act of Congress ends when that Congress ends, and Congresses have two-year life spans because that’s the term of House of Representatives terms. In the Senate it’s six. There’s one more year to go for this current Congress, which was sworn in this January, January 2019.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: I don’t think it would work that way. But it’s kind of academic because they’re not gonna stop. I fully expect them to add to these articles.
CALLER: Yes. That would give them time to add also.
RUSH: I think that’s gonna be the name of the game. As long as Pelosi is convinced that there will not be a conviction, she’s never gonna permit a trial. Now, there’s another thing that she’s attempting here. I should have mentioned this at the top. She is attempting, along with Chuck You Schumer, to engineer a Senate trial that actually is an investigation of additional charges.
That’s why they want four witnesses called. That’s when McConnell shut that down yesterday. Said, look, we judge the case. The House makes the case. The House is the prosecutor. They do the indictment, articles of impeachment, deliver to us, and we act as the jury and the chief justice is the judge and we go from there. We do not conduct investigations. We do not, as the jury, add to whatever is presented to us.
But they’re gonna try to force that under this rubric of fairness. And they have experience succeeding with this. Accusing the Republicans of being unfair in the past has worked. It worked in the Kavanaugh thing, for example. They let Blasey Ford come forth at the last moment and gum up all the works. They’re gonna try something like that here too.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Here’s Joel Pollak’s piece in Breitbart: “Senate Can Acquit Even If House Withholds Articles of Impeachment.”
Fast forward 200+ years, those articles were "transmitted" the minute they were posted on the White House website for the whole world to see.
They have been "transmitted".
On the other hand POTUS should call them back to convene for the purpose of a rapid trial (since he is so dangerous). Keep them in DC for Christmas away from their families. Send federal cops to chase down the absconders:
Source: [The President] may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.... Article II, Section 3
I would suggest that this is an extraordinary occasion. Call them back with the purpose of dismissing the articles, or proceed with trail. Call witnesses on Christmas eve if you have to.
The final whimper of the attempted coup d’état.
Just no: If the Senate conducts the proceeding, and the Chief Justice is the judge, and the House is the prosecution, then the proceeding is a trial. In a trial, BOTH SIDES must be allowed to call witnesses. The prosecution gets to call its witnesses, and the defense gets to call its witnesses. The jury (by analogy, the Senate) has NO control over that. Only the judge (the Chief Justice) does.
Yep. “Deemed” transmitted.
McTurtle should call a vote to acquit Trump. Then Pelosi’s attempt at extortion fizzles.
Let the Democrats explain to the American people why they suddenly got cold feet on prosecuting Trump in the Senate.
Ben there will be no end to the coup until they are put in jail or they’re dead
I’m waiting for Trump to use his favorite adjective “FAKE” to apply to the impeachment.
“This is a FAKE impeachment!”
Somebody please pass this along to the President.
The Chief Justice can make legal rulings but the Senate decides what to hear and whether there’s a vote at all.
Trump is going to sucker punch them - they'll never know what hit them.
With all that blah blah blah yesterday and today is Zzzzzz nuffin
Remember - Trump spent last Christmas sitting in the WH waiting for Congress to pass a spending bill reopening the shutdown govt
mitch should announce a start date for the trial and give the speaker 12 days to name her managers.
“Deem” them transmitted, vote, and get on with it.
Screw Pelosi. She’s insane.
This year Nancy will sign the Omnibus Bill herself because she’s now in charge don’t you know ,LOL
I could see Pelosi giving the middle finger to the President and tell him to “make us”. I could see them saying he is obstructing the “process”.
What happens if they ignore Article II, Sec 3?
This in NOT a court of law. It is the Senate and they set the rules...period.
“”””I’m waiting for Trump to use his favorite adjective “FAKE” to apply to the impeachment.
“This is a FAKE impeachment!”
Somebody please pass this along to the President.””””””
He already did today when he was interviewed.
From another post I made. A Lawfare blog response to what McConnell can do.
The Constitution does not by its express terms direct the Senate to try an impeachment. In fact, it confers on the Senate “the sole power to try,” which is a conferral of exclusive constitutional authority and not a procedural command. The Constitution couches the power to impeach in the same terms: it is the House’s “sole power.” The House may choose to impeach or not, and one can imagine an argument that the Senate is just as free, in the exercise of its own “sole power,” to decline to try any impeachment that the House elects to vote.
The current rules governing Senate practice and procedure do not pose an insurmountable problem for this maneuver. Senate leadership can seek to have the rules “reinterpreted” at any time by the device of seeking a ruling of the chair on the question, and avoiding a formal revision of the rule that would require supermajority approval. The question presented in some form would be whether, under the relevant rules, the Senate is required to hold an impeachment “trial” fully consistent with current rules—or even any trial at all. A chair’s ruling in the affirmative would be subject to being overturned by a majority, not two-thirds, vote.
The Senate has options for scuttling the impeachment process beyond a simple refusal to heed the House vote. The Constitution does not specify what constitutes a “trial,” and in a 1993 case involving a judicial impeachment, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Senate’s “sole power” to “try” means that it is not subject to any limitations on how it could conduct a proceeding. Senate leadership could engineer an early motion to dismiss and effectively moot the current rule’s call for the president or counsel to appear before the Senate. The rules in place provide at any rate only that “the Senate shall have power to compel the attendance of witnesses”: they do not require that any other than the president be called. Moreover, the Senate could adjourn at any time, terminating the proceedings and declining to take up the House articles. This is what happened in the trial of Andrew Johnson, in which the Senate voted on three articles and then adjourned without holding votes on the remaining eight.
** McConnell can Dismiss the house impeachment articles anytime. He has more cards then Pelosi.
But it’s not fake. Impeachment happened and will be part of his legacy. It may not be fair, but it happened. History will now be the judge and we have to trust historians will get it long after we are gone.
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