Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) a “rogue leader” on Wednesday after the Senate voted to acquit President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial.
The vote was 52-48, 53-47 on the first and second articles of impeachment, respectively, with only Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) voting with Democrats to remove Trump on the first article.
The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of Senators present to remove a president from office.
Democrats claim that they were prevented from removing Trump because the Senate voted last week not to hear new witnesses or demand new documents. Democrats refused to allow Republicans to call new witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry in December.
Pelosi issued a blistering statement via Twitter thread:
Our Founders put safeguards in the Constitution to protect against a rogue president. They never imagined that they would at the same time have a rogue leader in the Senate who would cowardly abandon his duty to uphold the Constitution.
President Trump was impeached with the support of a majority of the American people – a first in our nation’s history. And now he is the first President in history to face a bipartisan vote to convict him in the Senate.
The President will boast that he has been acquitted. There can be no acquittal without a trial, and no trial without witnesses, documents and evidence.
Because of the Republican Senate’s betrayal of the Constitution, the President remains an ongoing threat to American democracy, with his insistence that he is above the law and that he can corrupt the elections if he wants to.
The House will continue to protect our Constitution & #DefendOurDemocracy, both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.
She posted a longer statement at her website.
Some Republicans are already calling for Pelosi to be censured for her behavior during President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, when she tore up a copy of his speech as he concluded.
After the Senate vote Wednesday, McConnell told reporters that he believed Democrats had not only wanted to tarnish President Trump in advance of the 2020 election, but to put pressure on Republican Senators facing re-election.
He said that while he could not predict the result of the election in November, in the short term the Democrats had made a “colossal political mistake.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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