‘No Member of This Body Needs Condescending Lectures’: McConnell, Schumer Trade Barbs in Tense Senate Debate on Impeachment

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) opened the 2020 congressional session on Friday by doubling down on the body’s partisan deadlock over the framework in President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

McConnell opened the new year by mocking his colleagues across the aisle by diagnosing them with “Trump derangement syndrome” and a dangerously high “partisan fever.”

“I respect our friends across the aisle but it appears that one symptom of Trump derangement syndrome is also a bad case of amnesia,” said McConnell while referencing the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, who he claimed was let off the hook by Democrats in 1999 based on “a political judgment,” not a legal one. “And no member of this body needs condescending lectures on fairness from House Democrats who just rushed through the most unfair impeachment in modern history.”

“We can’t hold the trial without the articles. The Senate’s old rules don’t provide for that,” the Senate leader continued. “So, for now, we’re content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate while House Democrats continue to flounder. But if they ever muster the courage to stand behind their slapdash work product and transmit their articles to the Senate, it will then be time for the United States Senate to fulfill our founding purpose.”

Schumer spent the majority of his time on the Senate floor compelling Republicans to allow key “witnesses and documents” to be showcased in the Senate trial.

“As all eyes turn to the Senate, the question before us is: Will we fulfill our duty to conduct a fair impeachment trial of the president of the United States, or will we not,” Schumer began, insisting that Republicans have offered no real reasons as to why public witness testimony should be axed from the trial.

“There is only one precedent that matters,” he added, “there has never, never in the history of our country been an impeachment trial of a President in which the Senate was denied the ability to hear from witnesses.”

Schumer continued:

“The trial must be informed by the evidence, not the other way around. The House manager should be allowed to present all of the evidence to make their case — not make their case and afterward ask for evidence we know is out there. So if we don’t get a commitment upfront that the House managers will be able to call witnesses as part of their case, the Senate will act as a little more than a nationally televised meeting of the mock trial club.”

“When you are accused of something you don’t suppress evidence would exonerate you,” the senior New York senator concluded.

Watch McConnell and Schumer’s impeachment remarks on the Senate floor above, via Fox News.