Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called on Republican senators to “defend the Constitution” by voting for witnesses during Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s coverage of the impeachment trial.
Klobuchar said, “I thought it was incredibly effective because basically, you have a president that’s defied so many of their professed beliefs, right? They care about going after Russia. They care about defending democracies. They know that he hasn’t stood up for Ukraine. They know what happened. You have a president that has not told the truth, and they claim they want to tell the truth. I really thought it was effective when he said, you know he’s going to do it again. There was. Also, I thought of each individual senator, and Claire knows some of these people, but as she pointed out when the former police chief, Representative Demings, was talking about the coverup and she said, you know, over 100 times he went after the whistle-blower. Well, Senator Grassley has spent his career standing up for whistle-blowers. Or when they went through the way that the parts of the coverup and what he had done in terms of putting things on this super-secret server, and you think about all of those senators on the Republican side that claim that they want to make things transparent. There’s just a lot of interesting, really pokes they were making at their core beliefs. I just hope they listen because, in the end, it is about patriotism. This is about whether or not you just want to do this job, as I pointed out yesterday, to be able to buy your senate chair at the end and have a trophy on the shelf, or do you actually want to do your job and defend the Constitution. That’s what each and every one of them has to grapple with.”
She continued, “The question is, are they going to have that courage to actually stand up and say, as Adam Schiff did last night in his moving closing, right matters, doing the right thing matters.”
Klobuchar added, “What I want right now is the witnesses. I think once we get those witnesses, that’s their first — really their first point of decision. They’ve listened to all of this, and they’ve got to have somewhere in their souls’ fairness about our country and a belief in our Constitution, enough to say we should have evidence and witnesses. So once they decide that, then let’s see if they can get to the next step. In terms of what happens with this proceeding, I think Americans understand this is one very important legal proceeding, but there’s also an election. That is the opportunity for every American to be a juror, and if the past is any indication from what we saw in the last few years with victories in places like Louisiana and Kentucky and taking back the House of Representatives, it wasn’t just our fired-up Democratic base. It was Independents. It was moderate Republicans. It was people that came together and said, ‘look, I may not agree with everything Democrats say, but I sure want balance with this guy.’ To me, it is a great moment for our country, for a values check, for a patriotism check.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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