Opinion: Nancy Pelosi is not required to sit back and watch Mitch McConnell violate the Constitution’s core commitment to fair trials under the rule of law.
,” he said, since"I'm not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain” for the whole process.
Unless something changes, politics will displace law in any Trump impeachment trial. To her credit but also to her peril, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has departed from the example the House set in 1998, when members immediately walked over the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Instead, the speaker has announced that transmission of theseSome accuse the speaker of her own political maneuvering to deny, or at least to delay, the president’s right to answer his accusers.
If the speaker persists and refuses to deliver the impeachment articles to the Senate, some will say she is the oneWhile the Constitution contains no explicit provisions concerning the time frame for transmitting articles of impeachment to the Senate, or even compelling delivery, you could argue that it implicitly assumes a Senate trial will follow impeachment in a timely manner.
In ordinary circumstances, this argument might be persuasive. However, these are not ordinary times. Left unstopped, McConnell by his own words stands ready to violate the Constitution’s core commitment tounder the rule of law. The Constitution does not require the speaker to sit back and watch the Senate disobey the Constitution. And McConnell cannot invoke the importance of holding a Senate trial while refusing to hold anything resembling an open trial.
An early draft of the Constitution proposed holding impeachment trials before the Supreme Court. But Alexander Hamilton thought it would be a mistake to take all politics out of the impeachment trial. Instead, he counted on the Senate’s ability to distinguish between the petty politics of self-interest and the permanent political interests of the people in living under the rule of law. The veryBefore it is too late, we should all raise a glass to constitutional sobriety.
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