Make wishtv.com your home page

White House predicts Pelosi will yield on impeachment delay

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is projecting confidence that it
will prevail in a constitutional spat with Democrats over the nature of
the Senate’s impeachment trial, which threatens to deprive President
Donald Trump of the swift acquittal he seeks.

The House voted
Wednesday to impeach Trump, who became only the third president in U.S.
history to be formally charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delayed sending the articles of impeachment to
the Senate until Republicans provide details on witnesses and testimony
in hopes of shaping the upcoming trial. Democratic and Republican
leaders in the chamber remain at an impasse over the question of whether
witnesses will be called, but the White House believes Pelosi won’t be
able to hold out much longer.

“She will yield. There’s no way she
can hold this position,” Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice
President Mike Pence, said Sunday. “We think her case is going
nowhere.’’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have been at an impasse
over the issue of new testimony, leaving open the possibility of a
protracted delay until the articles are delivered. Trump complained
Saturday that the holdup was “unfair” and claimed that Democrats were
violating the Constitution, as the delay threatened to prolong the pain
of impeachment and cast uncertainty on the timing of the vote Trump is
set to claim as vindication.

Schumer told reporters in New York
that “the Senate is yearning to give President Trump due process, which
means that documents and witnesses should come forward. What is a trial
with no witnesses and no documents. It’s a sham trial.”

Short
called Pelosi’s delay unacceptable, saying she’s “trampling” Trump’s
rights to “rush this through, and now we’re going to hold it up to
demand a longer process in the Senate with more witnesses.”

“If her case is so air-tight … why does she need more witnesses to make her case?’’ Short said.

White
House officials have highlighted Democrats’ arguments that removing
Trump was an “urgent” matter before the House impeachment vote, as they
seek to put pressure on Pelosi to send the articles of impeachment to
the Senate.

McConnell has all but promised an easy acquittal of
the president, and he appears to have secured Republican support for his
plans to impose a framework drawn from the 1999 impeachment trial of
President Bill Clinton. That trial featured a 100-0 vote on arrangements
that established two weeks of presentations and argument before a
partisan tally in which then-minority Republicans called a limited
number of witnesses.

That has sparked a fight with Pelosi and
Schumer, who are demanding trial witnesses who refused to appear during
House committee hearings, including acting White House chief of staff
Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton.

A
close Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Pelosi would fail in
her quest “to get Mitch McConnell to bend to her will to shape the
trial.’’ Graham is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was a
House manager, comparable to a prosecutor, during the Senate’s
impeachment trial of Clinton.

“She’ll eventually send the articles
because public opinion will crush the Democrats,” said Graham. Asked
whether he expected witnesses in the Senate, he replied: : “No, I
don’t.”

At one point, Trump had demanded the testimony of
witnesses of his own, like Democrats Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and
the intelligence community whistleblower whose summer complaint sparked
the impeachment probe. But he has since relented after concerted
lobbying by McConnell and other Senate Republicans who pushed him to
accept the swift acquittal from the Senate and not to risk injecting
uncertainty into the process by calling witnesses.

The Senate’s
second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said his party is
looking for a signal from McConnell that he hasn’t ruled out new
witnesses and documents. But Durbin acknowledged that Democrats may not
have much leverage in pushing a deal.

He criticized both
Republican and Democratic senators who have already announced how they
will vote in the trial, saying the Constitution requires senators to act
as impartial jurors. Republicans hold a 53-vote majority in the Senate.

“The
leverage is our hope that four Republican senators will stand up, as 20
years ago, we saw in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and say, this is
much bigger than our current political squabbles,” Durbin said.

The
Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict in
an impeachment trial — and Republicans have expressed confidence that
they have more than enough votes to keep Trump in office.

Short
spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” Durbin appeared on CNN’s “State of the
Union,” and Graham was on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”