The Iowa Standard joined Sen. Chuck Grassley for his Capitol Hill Report on Monday. We asked Sen. Grassley about his thoughts on the upcoming impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump.
“I intend to approach it over the next four or five days – and I don’t think it’ll last longer than that – as a juror listening to the prosecution and to the defense. And then some time deciding to vote guilty or not guilty. And, I ought to listen to it. I think that a great big minority of the Senate, at least at one count 45 because we had a vote on it, that it wasn’t constitutional to impeach a citizen of the United States as opposed to an officeholder. If you read the Constitution, two things – one, if you’re doing the President of the United States, the Chief Justice must preside and Roberts isn’t going to preside because Trump isn’t President. The other aspect of the Constitution is removal from office and… and that word and is very important. Removal from office and you can put on proscriptions about ever running for office again. And so, he’s not President, so that is very important. It seems to me that it’d be difficult. So I can only tell you how I think it might go based upon the vote we had a couple of weeks ago on the Paul amendment.”
Grassley was asked why he believes the Democrats are pursuing impeachment.
“I assume they have some idea that Trump may be a candidate for President again. And I presume he could be a candidate again and they want to make sure he’s never a strong candidate. But four years is a long ways off and he’ll be four years older – 78 years of age. I wouldn’t have any idea whether he’d be a candidate for President. I bet we’ve got 10 (presidential candidates) and probably three-fourths of them are in the United States Senate wanting to run for president. And the other thing is we have a lot of important business that we’d be better off doing than an impeachment.”
