Ted Cruz, Mike Lee Take on Chuck Schumer for Tabling Mayorkas Impeachment Trial

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

I would think that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would recall when his predecessor Senator Dirty Harry Reid from the great state of Nevada made some critical errors on how to conduct Senate business that would later come around and bite them ( democrats) in the rear.

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No one has ever accused Chuck though of being a deep thinker.

If you don't recall why Chuck should have learned from Harry not that long ago, here is a brief reminder from the year 2013, when Harry screwed the Senate and Democrats in the chamber. 

Eight years later in 2013, it would be Harry Reid and a Democratic majority that would do away with the filibuster for executive branch appointments and judicial nominations, with the exception of the Supreme Court. Despite warnings from the minority that it was a decision they would live to regret, Reid and the Democrats deployed the nuclear option anyway. 

Their day of reckoning came on Jan. 20, 2017, with a Republican president and Senate in control of judicial nominations. For the past four years, President Donald Trump and Republicans have done their constitutional duty in nominating and confirming federal judges, including now three Supreme Court nominations. But don’t blame Trump or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Blame Harry Reid who put politics ahead of principle and opened the door for Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and soon Amy Coney Barrett.

That decision by Reid opened the door for Mitch McConnell to change the rules for approval of Supreme Court Justice nominees and that ultimately helped overturn  Roe v Wade.

Thanks, Harry.

So you would really think that Chuck from New York would slow his roll a bit before changing any more rules in the Senate before moving forward with any new radical maneuver.

Nope.

Thankfully Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Mike Lee penned an Op-Ed piece where they give a helpful hint to their colleagues right HERE.

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When House Speaker Mike Johnson sends the Senate the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is obligated to prepare for a trial. Instead Mr. Schumer plans to offer a motion to table the articles of impeachment by majority vote.

The Constitution, Senate rules and precedent are clear: The Senate has an obligation to vote on articles of impeachment. In the nation’s history, there have been 21 instances in which the House has sent articles of impeachment to the Senate. In three of those cases, the official who was impeached had left office, so the Senate didn’t proceed. In the other 18 cases—including Donald Trump’s second impeachment, which the House delivered after his term ended—the Senate conducted a trial and senators ultimately voted guilty or not guilty. That’s the process demanded by the Constitution and clearly laid out in the Senate rules.

During its ordinary business, the Senate routinely takes up motions to table legislation and other matters. But when sitting as a court of impeachment, the chamber operates under special rules that resemble a court’s process to preserve justice, protect the accused person’s due-process rights, and ultimately render judgment on the charges. The impeachment rules have no provision for a motion to table.

I don’t understand constitutional or Senate rules well enough to make a knowledgeable comment about the case laid out by Senators Cruz and Lee. The Constitution lays out the process of what happens when the House of Representatives impeaches someone and the Senate has over 200 years of precedent on how they have handled this. 

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However, I'm quite confident in what will happen if Chuck Schumer tries to protect Joe Biden from a lengthy discussion about how he has failed at the border by featuring his Homeland Security Secretary in a Senate trial. If Schumer goes ahead and tries to table this thus changing the rules of how this has been handled since the Constitution was adopted, this will boomerang back on him and his party and they will regret that they ever did this to save a doddering old fool like Joe Biden.

Once that genie gets out of the bottle it's never going back into it.

If Trump and the Republicans win in 2024 and take control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2024 quite possibly the only people feeling heartburn won't be the Democrats in the legislative chamber.  As my colleague Joe Cunningham pointed out earlier today, possibly Donald Trump and some of his supporters may want to give Joe Biden and his family the treatment that Trump and his have gotten over the past couple of years.


READ MORE: Trump and the GOP Are Planning to Go After Biden in 2025, and Democrats Have Themselves to Blame


From that article...

Axios has a scoop this morning essentially confirming that this is something Trump and the Republican Party want to do.

Republicans' impeachment probe of President Biden is unraveling because of a lack of evidence — but their work could become the basis for federal investigations and even prosecutions of the Biden family if Donald Trump wins re-election, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Trump has vowed retribution against his enemies if he wins in November. House Republicans have struggled to show Biden has done anything illegal, but people close to Trump are still plotting to use the Justice Department against Biden and his family.

  • A source close to the Trump campaign said that "everything you have seen from the Biden DOJ," in terms of the charges against Trump, "you can expect to see from the Trump DOJ."
  • One Trump ally argued that there is precedent for a second Trump administration to investigate and prosecute the Bidens: the current federal charges against Trump.

This is what the Democratic Party has (once again) wrought. They decided that they had the power and the ability to weaponize the legal system against a political opponent. The GOP, then, has the same power and they are absolutely going to use it. Why wouldn't they?

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Why wouldn't they indeed?

Senators Cruz and Lee have given the warning on the changing the Senate rules so Chuck should heed it and that now applies across the board it seems.

However, once again, no one has ever accused Schumer of being smart or a deep thinker.

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