The Ins and Outs of Delaying a Senate Impeachment Trial: What the Dems are up to — and what the Constitution says about it.

After her Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she might just wait awhile before sending the articles over to the Senate for trial. “We will make our decision as to when we are going to send it when we see what they are doing on the Senate side,” Speaker Pelosi said. “So far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to us.” The House Democrats want the Senate to call the witnesses who House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler failed to call during their sham hearings. In their rush to impeach, they were too impatient to wait for a court decision compelling the witnesses to testify.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded Thursday morning to the House’s impeachment process and the latest delay tactics. He said that “House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.” In a further dig, the Senate Majority Leader added, “Looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet.” He noted that the same Democrats who stressed the urgency of impeaching President Trump immediately now seem “content to sit on their hands.”

Senator McConnell excoriated “Speaker Pelosi’s House” for conducting “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history.” He charged the Democrats with exhibiting “partisan rage at this particular President,” creating “a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.”

Speaker Pelosi once again displayed her partisan rage when she went out of her way to personally insult Senator McConnell, calling him a “rogue leader.” She continued to insist at a Thursday morning press conference that, before the House moves forward with appointing its prosecution managers, it must first “see the process that is set forth in the Senate.” In other words, the House Democrats want a veto power over the Senate trial process. Like petulant children, they threaten to take their marbles and go home unless they get their way. Speaker Pelosi was testy when pressed by reporters.

The House Democrats most likely got their idea to delay sending their articles of impeachment over to the Senate from Harvard Law School’s Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe. Professor Tribe has been a strong advocate for impeaching President Trump. Nevertheless, in an op-ed column he wrote for the Washington Post, Professor Tribe recommended delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate until there is clarification of the Senate trial rules. “This option needs to be taken seriously now that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has announced his intention to conduct not a real trial but a whitewash, letting the president and his legal team call the shots,” Professor Tribe wrote. He then disputed any constitutional objections to such a delay strategy. He opined that “the House, whose historical role is to prosecute articles of impeachment in the Senate after exercising its ‘sole’ power to impeach, is under no affirmative constitutional obligation to do so instantly.”

Read the rest from Joseph Klein HERE.

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