Congressman Steve King releases the following video of remarks he delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives this morning. King took the opportunity to speak on the subject of Speaker Pelosi’s failure to transmit the House passed Articles of Impeachment (King voted against both Articles, for reference see: King Stands with the Constitution and President Trump, Votes Against “Sore Loser Democrats” Sham Articles of Impeachment) to the United Senate so that the Senate could conduct a trial.
In his remarks, King makes it abundantly clear that by unilaterally withholding the Articles of Impeachment from the Senate, Speaker Pelosi is creating an unsustainable position, by which the Speaker of the House would have granted herself a de facto veto over any majority action taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.
King also makes it clear that Speaker Pelosi’s entire impeachment strategy to date has been to appease the “visceral hatred for Donald Trump, among the hardcore left in this country that’s driving the caucus on that side” and to use impeachment itself as a smokescreen to shield the public from the extent to which the Executive Branch, through entities such as former FBI Director James Comey and inclusive of many members of the nation’s intelligence community, has itself been weaponized against Donald Trump.
As King correctly observes, neither of the two Articles of Impeachment currently being held hostage by Speaker Pelosi contain any crimes, making it even more important that the Senate timely receive the Articles to provide the President with the opportunity to stand before the world with a full exoneration prior to the State of the Union Address on February 4.
Transcript of Congressman King’s remarks:
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker, it’s my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come before you this morning to remind this House, and to speak about the procedure that is pending in the Senate, and some activities that need to take place in this House before that is likely to happen.
And that, of course, is this impeachment of the President of the United States. It took place December 18th, and we will be waiting nearly a month before the Articles of Impeachment could be transferred over to the United States Senate which would then begin the enactment of a trial, and, hopefully, a fair trial, with the opportunity for the President to defend himself over in the United States Senate.
I was here in this city for three days of the impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee in 1998, and I was able to observe the activities here in this House, how people acted. I’ll say the people who were defending Bill Clinton were not serious outside the camera in the House Judiciary Committee.
And, here, we have an impeachment that’s been brought forward on two different charges. And we watched as from the beginning, from clear back in November of 2016, this discussion about impeaching the President of the United States began. It began on November 9th, when the first Democrat stepped up and said, ‘we’re going to impeach this President.’ We had people that ran for office to get into this Congress that announced that ‘were going to impeach the…’- I can’t put those words into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. So, this has been a driven agenda and it began as soon as the other side realized that Donald Trump was the duly elected and legitimate President of the United States.
And there’s two reasons this impeachment has taken place here: one of them is because there’s a deep, visceral hatred for Donald Trump, among the hard core left in this country that’s driving the caucus on that side. And another reason is because the investigations that came about because of the weaponization of the executive branch of the United States, and I mean particularly the Department of Justice, within it the F.B.I., some of the State Department, much of the intelligence community, working together, to surveil President Trump’s campaign operations and then, as President-Elect, Donald Trump’s inauguration activities and communications before that, and there’s surveillance afterwards.
And the circumstances that came about when James Comey took information that was proprietary, and, many say, classified, and leaked it to a professor at Columbia University with directions to leak it to the New York Times with the objective of creating a special counsel that needed to be Robert Mueller, who couldn’t have been changed differently by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he had recused himself from Russia.
This is the backdrop of this. Impeachment puts a cloud up in front of the activities that took place that should appall this nation at the highest and highest level. So now what I ask, Mr. Speaker, is this: let’s get these articles of impeachment done in this House this week. Let’s send them down, across the rotunda, to the United States Senate. Let’s ask the Senate to go ahead and work your will under your rules. But my ask is this, having lived through this as a witness back in 1998, we didn’t get a clean verdict in the United States Senate. I’m going from memory here, I didn’t look up these articles and the actual vote, but I remember the public never knew from each Senator whether they believed that President Clinton was guilty of the various charges that were brought before him. They were all wrapped up in one question: ‘if he’s guilty is he worthy of being removed from office?’ When you package those things together, and you had Democratic Senators defending Bill Clinton, they say ‘Well, I didn’t have to wonder if he was guilty because if he was it didn’t rise to the level to remove him from office.’
I’d like to know, and I think the public wants to know, and I think it is a Constitutional duty of the United States Senate to give us a verdict. Did the President actually obstruct Congress? Did he actually abuse power? And what were the definitions of those things? They’re not crimes. What were the definitions? Let’s find out the judgment of these Senators, yes or no, guilty or not guilty, and then the next question is should he be removed from office. I say not! I didn’t see the evidence here, I don’t see any crimes and there have been no crimes.
In delaying these Articles of Impeachment, if the Speaker can block a majority action from the House of Representatives, the Speaker can block every action from the floor of the House of Representatives. It is not a sustainable position for the Speaker to refuse to message and have a de facto veto because that would make the Speaker of the House all-powerful, with a veto for any piece of action that would come through the floor of the House of Representatives.
Let’s get this done this week, and I encourage the Senate to get it done quickly. I’d like to see the President stand here before us at the State of the Union Address, February 4th, and be able to announce to the world that he’s been exonerated by the United States Senate.
Mr. Speaker, I yield, back.”
