But several Democrats said that part of Pelosi’s calculation is hoping that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and minority leader Mitch McConnell will reach a 50-50 Senate power-sharing agreement, something that still remains to be done. are negotiating.
“They have now informed us that they are ready to receive,” Pelosi told Senate reporters on Thursday, noting that there are “other questions about how the trial will proceed.”
“I won’t say when it was happening,” she added, refusing to offer any further details.
The House voted to impeach Trump on January 13, with a week to go, as all Democrats and nearly a dozen Republicans warned that he posed a clear and present danger to the country.
But Pelosi has so far avoided transmitting the article to the Senate, a process that involves impeachment administrators in the House handing over paperwork over the Capitol dome. It is a move similar to Pelosi’s treatment of Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019, when Democrats waited weeks during Congress’ winter break to broadcast the articles while carefully trying to choreograph the start of the Senate trial.
This time, the process is more complicated because the start of an impeachment trial in the Senate would come when Trump was out of office and a newly inaugurated president, Joe Biden, tried to close his office in the midst of several national crises.
The Senate is moving quickly to approve key national security posts this week, but a trial – which would require senators to sit in the House six days a week for its duration – would almost certainly delay the process for at least some of Biden’s nominees. .
To further complicate matters, Schumer and McConnell have yet to reach an agreement to govern the Senate, which several Democrats said will have considerable influence when Pelosi submits the article and the trial begins. The biggest obstacle to reaching an agreement is McConnell’s demand that Schumer preserve the legislative obstruction, which Democrats rejected.
Unlike 2019, however, when almost all Republicans were in favor of Trump’s absolution, his fate in the Senate remains uncertain. 17 Republicans are unlikely to vote to condemn their former president, but top Republican senators, including McConnell, say they remain undecided and the calculation of the Republican Party conference could change quickly.
Some Republicans have questioned the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial now that Trump is no longer in office. Some also complained that the Democrats’ impeachment action by Trump – regardless of his involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots that left five people dead – would undermine Biden’s calls for national unity in his inauguration ceremony on Wednesday.
But Pelosi told reporters on Thursday that he “is not concerned” about that argument.
“The president of the United States committed an act of inciting insurrection,” said Pelosi. “I don’t think it’s very unifying to say, oh, let’s just forget about it and move on. This is not how you unify. ”
“Just because he’s gone – thank God – you don’t say to a president, ‘Do what you want in the last few months of your administration. You will get a card to get out of prison for free ‘because people think you must be nice, nice and forget that people died here on January 6th. “