WASHINGTON (CN) — The pageantry of the impeachment process is a rare event but one the nation is reacquainting itself with as the Senate prepares to weigh whether President Donald J. Trump should be removed from office.
“The House’s time is over; the Senate’s time is at hand,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said from the Senate floor this morning. “It’s time for this proud body to honor our founding purpose."
House impeachment managers made their way through the Capitol an hour later to present the Senate with the two articles against Trump, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
McConnell has slammed the process since it began in the House last year, regularly dismissing Trump’s impeachment as one-sided political gamesmanship led by grudge-holding Democrats.
Even as the entire Capitol Building was abuzz Thursday with ceremonial procedures and preparation for the swearing-in of all 100 U.S. senators, the Kentucky senator took to the floor to lament the circumstances. It was the distribution of pens used to sign the impeachment articles by Speaker Pelosi just a day earlier that appeared to irk the majority leader. He suggested Democrats were cheapening the sacred process.
“Nothing says seriousness and sobriety like handing out souvenirs as though this were a happy bill signing instead of the gravest process in our Constitution,” McConnell said.
But McConnell’s critiques on the grandeur reserved for the rare act of impeachment stand alongside his own controversial comments on the process.
Just two days ago, the watchdog group Public Citizen filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee seeking review of the constitutionality of McConnell’s statements to reporters on Dec. 17 when he plainly said he would not be an impartial juror once trial proceedings begin.
His statement is not just a politically charged football for his critics but one that is at odds with the ceremonial oath he and 99 other senators take Thursday afternoon: “I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.”
“Today it will be largely ceremonial but soon, it will be constitutional,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday. “Senators must do impartial justice. The weight of that oath will fall on our shoulders and our ability to honor it will be preserved in history.”
The entirety of the U.S. Senate took the oath after the body’s president pro tempore Chuck Grassley swore in the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts, who donned the traditional black robes as he stood at the dais on the Senate floor.
As is the tradition for impeachment, Roberts walked across the street from the nation’s highest court to the Senate where he was ushered inside with Grassley as his escort.