February 9, 2021
“You will not be hearing extended lectures from me because our case is based on cold, hard facts. It’s all about the facts. President Trump has sent his lawyers here today to try to stop the Senate from hearing the facts of this case. They want to call the trial over before any evidence is even introduced. Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity. You get away with it. In other words, conduct that would be a high crime and misdemeanor in your first year as president and your second year as president and your third year as president and for the vast majority of your fourth year as president, you can suddenly do in your last few weeks in office without facing any constitutional accountability at all. This would create a brand new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America. A January exception.
“And everyone can see immediately why this is so dangerous. It’s an invitation to the President to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door, to hang onto the Oval Office at all costs, and to block the peaceful transfer of power. In other words, the January exception is an invitation to our founder’s worst nightmare. And if we buy this radical argument that President Trump’s lawyers advance, we risk allowing January 6th to become our future. And what will that mean for America? Think about it. What will the January exception mean to future generations if you grant it?
“And if the President’s arguments for a January exception are upheld, then even if everyone agrees that he’s culpable for these events, even if the evidence proves, as we think it definitively does, that the President incited a violent insurrection on the day Congress met to finalize the presidential election, he would have you believe there is absolutely nothing the Senate can do about it. No trial, no facts. He wants you to decide that the Senate is powerless at that point. That can’t be right.
“The transition of power is always the most dangerous moment for democracies. Every historian will tell you that. We just saw it in the most astonishing way. We lived through it. And you know what? The framers of our Constitution knew it. That’s why they created a Constitution with an oath written into it that binds the President from his very first day in office until his very last day in office, and every day in between. Under that Constitution and under that oath, the President of the United States is been in to commit high crimes and misdemeanors against the people at any point that he’s an office. Indeed, that’s one specific reason the impeachment, conviction, and disqualification powers exists, to protect us against presidents who try to overrun the power of the people in their elections and replace the rule of law with the rule of mobs. These powers must apply even if the President commits his offenses in his final weeks in office. In fact, that’s precisely when we need them the most because that’s when elections get attacked.
“Everything that we know about the language of the Constitution, the framers’ original understanding and intent, prior Senate practice, and common sense confirms this rule. Let’s start with the text of the Constitution, which in article one, section two gives the House the sole power of impeachment when the President commits high crimes and misdemeanors. We exercised that power on January 13th. The President, it is undisputed, committed his offense while he was president. And it is undisputed that we impeached him while he was president. There can be no doubt that this is a valid and legitimate impeachment, and there can be no doubt that the Senate has the power to try this impeachment. We know this because article one, section three gives the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments. The Senate has the power, the sole power, to try all impeachments.
“All means all. There are no exceptions to the rule. Because the Senate has jurisdiction to try all impeachments, it most certainly has jurisdiction to try this one. It’s really that simple.”
