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by Countable's Trump Impeachment Coverage | 9.30.19

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reiterated in a Monday interview that his chamber would hold a trial if the House of Representatives advances articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, putting an end to speculation his chamber would ignore them altogether.

“Under the Senate rules, we’re required to take it up if the House does go down that path, and we’ll follow the rules,” McConnell explained on CNBC’s Squawk Alley. He added that:

“It’s a Senate rule related to impeachment that would take 67 votes to change, so I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you’re on it is a whole different matter, but I would have no choice but to take it up.”

The Constitution grants the Senate the sole power to try impeachments and remove officials following conviction by a two-thirds vote of senators, but it doesn’t explicitly require the chamber to consider House-passed articles of impeachment or to hold a trial.

The Senate’s rules as established in the handling of past impeachments, however, require the chamber to consider impeachment articles it receives from the House. And as the majority leader alluded to, changing that rule would require a two-thirds supermajority vote ― which would be difficult to achieve given the Senate’s current partisan breakdown.

But the Senate has discretion in how it goes about considering articles of impeachment. For example, it can hold a trial before the full Senate, form a special committee to take evidence and testimony (a certified transcript of which is provided to the full Senate), or it could receive some evidence in committee and other evidence before the full Senate.

The Supreme Court upheld the Senate’s ability to determine its own impeachment procedures after Judge Walter Nixon, Jr. was impeached in 1989 and challenged the Senate’s use of an impeachment trial committee. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Senate’s ability to set its own impeachment procedures as a non-justiciable political question in Nixon v. U.S. (1993), finding that the matter couldn’t be resolved by the judiciary because the Constitution gives vests impeachment power in Congress.

The Senate could also vote on a motion to dismiss some or all of the articles of impeachment under consideration early on in the process or once it is well underway. In the past, the Senate has voted to dismiss charges following the resignation of the official at the center of the ongoing impeachment inquiry, and the only time it didn’t proceed to a trial was because the official resigned before it could begin.

Once a Senate impeachment trial is underway, there’s also no requirement that it vote on every impeachment article it receives. After the House approved 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson in 1868, the Senate voted on three of the articles but each fell one vote shy of a sufficient majority for conviction before declining to consider the rest of the articles.

— Eric Revell

(Photo Credit: CNBC via YouTube)

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