Tuesday on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Republican party and President Donald Trump’s attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller made the country “look like a banana republic.”
Schumer said, “I call on President Trump tonight to use his State of the Union to tell Americans what he plans to do about Russian attacks on our democracy. Implement sanctions, President Trump, or at the very least tell us why you haven’t because today is the day that the president is supposed to obey the sanctions issue Congress voted on overwhelmingly a while back.”
He continued, “There is no subject more worthy of a thorough and bias investigation than the Russian interference in our elections. Yet the president and his allies have waged a scorched earth campaign to discredit it in any way possible by assassinating the character of career civil servants, assailing the credibility of the media, attacking our own law enforcement agencies and officers, even denigrating the institutions of American government. The White House and congressional Republicans’ attacks on Mueller and his investigation make you believe it was taking place in a banana republic, Erdoğan’s Turkey or Putin’s Russia, not in the United States of America. What has been done by House Republicans and gone along with by just about the whole Republican establishment is not worthy of this democracy. It makes us look like a banana republic, and it is shameful.”
He added, “A different kind of president would be encouraging Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, shouting down those forces that tried to interfere it. A different kind of president would want to know how precisely Russia meddled in our election and wanted to severely punish Putin to discourage him from trying it again. But here we are, 180 days since the president signed the historic Russia bill passed by this body and he hasn’t even implemented those sanctions. He’s supposed to do it today, the day of the State of the Union. Again, Mr. President, implement the sanctions tonight or at least tell the American people why you’re not.”
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