Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) urged his colleagues on Monday not to break centuries of Senate precedent by burying the articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without a trial.
Kennedy encouraged his colleagues to adopt his resolution, S. Res. 623, which would establish fair and efficient trial procedures for this impeachment according to longstanding Senate precedent.
Key excerpts from Kennedy’s speech are below:
“I fear, though, that Senate Democrats are going to try to take the articles of impeachment that our colleagues in the United States House of Representatives thoughtfully crafted and passed with a majority vote and toss them into the trash without hearing from either side.
“They don’t want to let the House impeachment managers make their case. They don’t want to let Secretary Mayorkas make his case. They just want to ignore the House’s evidence summarily, sweep it under the rug and move on. And that is wrong.
“The Senate has never in its history tabled an impeachment. Never. In the more than 200 years that this body has existed, the House of Representatives has impeached an official 21 times, and we have never once tabled the impeachment. Not once.
“Now, Senator Schumer may also try to dismiss these charges instead of tabling them, but that’s never been done before either. If the Senate dismisses these charges without a trial, it will be the first time in the Senate’s long history that it has dismissed impeachment charges against an official it has jurisdiction over without that official first resigning—and that’s a fact.”
. . .
“Americans need to hear what I’m about to say, even if my Democrat colleagues won’t listen. Let me say it again: A majority of the duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives—who represent all the different communities across America—spent months investigating the allegations against Secretary Mayorkas. They spent months crafting the articles of impeachment, and a majority of the House then voted ‘yes’ to bring two very serious charges. The Senate Democrats are now treating those charges—those articles of impeachment—like spam that landed in their inbox.
“Americans, however, are not nearly so sanguine about the border crisis that has brought death, drugs, violence, chaos, criminals and mayhem into their neighborhoods. The Biden administration’s border crisis is as unprecedented as the majority leader’s move to bury the evidence of who could be to blame here.
“I, for one, want to hear the House’s evidence, and so do the American people.”
. . .
“I’m going to have a resolution—if I’m allowed to present it, Madam President—that will give us the procedures we need to conduct this trial fairly and efficiently . . . It’ll be efficient. It’ll be fair. It’ll be honest. It won’t uproot the longstanding precedent we have to give articles of impeachment in the past.
“If the majority leader and my Democratic colleagues table or dismiss these charges and destroy Senate precedent, a precedent we’ve established to conduct full and fair impeachment trials, they will regret it. They will regret it. Senate Democrats, if they do that, will show the world that their proclamations about protecting democracy and upholding the rule of law are just tools of their own political expedience and arrogance.
“Senate Democrats will let people, the American people, know that they endorse the lawlessness and misery the Biden administration’s broken border has brought to this country.”
Read Kennedy’s impeachment resolution here.
View Kennedy’s full speech here.
