Watch the video and read the transcript of Pat Cipollone on partisanship in the House of Representatives impeachment hearings on the 9th day of the Trump Impeachment trial in the Senate.
Senator Thune and the other Senators asked the Counsel for the President:
On March 6th 2019 speaker Nancy Pelosi said quote impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country and quote. Alexander Hamilton also warned in Federalist 65 against the quote persecution of an intemperate or designing majority in the House of Representatives with respect to impeachment. In evaluating the case against the President, should the Senate take into account the partisan nature of the impeachment proceedings in the house.
Thank you Mr. Chief Justice, members of the Senate,
Absolutely you should take that into account. That’s dispositive, that should end it. Based on the statements that we heard the last time from our friends on the Democratic side, that’s a reason why you shouldn’t have an impeachment, Speaker Pelosi was right when she said that.
Unfortunately she didn’t follow her own advice. We’ve never been in a situation where we have the impeachment of a president in an election year with the goal of removing the president from the ballot. As I said before, that is the most massive election interference we’ve ever witnessed. Its domestic election interference, its political election interference, and it’s wrong. They don’t talk about the horrible consequences to our country, of doing that, but they would be terrible, they would tear us apart for generations, and the American people wouldn’t accept it.
Let me address in that context the importance of the vote for their inquiry which also had bipartisan opposition. Now they said what, we were fine when speaker Pelosi announced it, we didn’t need to vote, the subpoenas were authorized. Then why did they have a vote? They had a vote because they understood they had a big problem that they needed the fix. But’s what’s more important about the vote than the procedural issue. The important thing about the vote is that if you’re going to start an impeachment investigation, particularly in an election year, there needs to be political accountability to the American people. You can’t just go have a press conference. If you’re going to say that the votes of the American people need to be disallowed, that all of the ballots need to be torn up, then at the very least you need to be accountable to your home district for that decision, and now they are, and now they are, and if the American people decide, if they’re allowed to vote, if the American people decide that they don’t like what’s happened here, that they don’t like the Constitutional violations that have happened, that they don’t like the attack on a successful president for purely partisan political purposes, then they can do something about it, and they can throw them out. That’s why a vote’s important. We should never even consider removing the name of a president from the ballot on a purely partisan basis in an election-year. Important, I’ll say it’s important, for that reason alone, and for the interest of uniting our country it must be rejected.
Thank you Mr. Chief Justice.
Thank you, Counsel
