Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, spoke on the Senate floor Monday during the impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. The Senate will vote Wednesday afternoon on the articles of impeachment.
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Hawaii U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz declared President Donald Trump to be “guilty on both counts” in the impeachment trial, and Schatz announced on the U.S. Senate floor Monday that he will vote to convict the president.
“The president is not above the law,” said Schatz, a Democrat, in remarks shortly after noon Hawaii time. “No one is above the law.
“There are millions of Americans that have formed a basic expectation about how a trial is to function based on hundreds of years of law and based on their common sense, and so make no mistake: What the Senate did was a basic affront to the basic idea of a trial,” Schatz said.
“And for all of the crocodile tears of my colleagues, all of the fake outrage at the accusation, we must call this what it was: It’s a cover-up.”
Senate Republicans refused to allow witnesses to be called in Trump’s trial in the Senate. Trump has been impeached by the Democratic-run U.S. House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress but is almost certain to be acquitted later this week in the Republican-run Senate.
Schatz said he does not know what the witnesses would say if his Senate colleagues were to reverse themselves and hear witness testimony, “but it is impossible for me to escape the conclusion that they don’t want to know, that they wanted to get this over with before the Super Bowl, of all things. They are afraid of this house of cards falling all the way down.”
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Schatz said the Senate Republicans are in a particularly difficult spot, one that requires “uncommon courage,” adding, “They have to risk the scorn of their voters, their social circle, their colleagues and their president in order to do the right thing.”
“On one level I knew the likely outcome, but the bitter taste of injustice lingers in my mouth,” Schatz said. “On behalf of everyone who couldn’t get away with an unpaid traffic fine, is in jail for stealing groceries so that they could eat that night, who can’t get a job because of medical debt, I say shame on anyone who places this president or any president above the law.”
Schatz said the framers of the U.S. Constitution designed the American political system so that voters, the Judiciary and Congress would act as a check on the chief executive, “but the framers couldn’t contemplate this level of polarization, when even in the face of the overwhelming evidence of high crimes, one party would not just exonerate him for it, but in fact ratify these crimes.”
“They didn’t imagine that one party would be so uniformly loyal to its president that it could maintain a hammerlock on the Senate, preventing the prospect of 67 votes from ever being available for removal,” Schatz said. Convicting Trump and removing him from office would require a two-thirds vote of the 100-member Senate.
“I don’t think we’re in danger of the impeachment process becoming routine. I think we’re in much greater danger of making the impeachment process moot, and if so, God help us all,” Schatz said. “But all is not lost. We remain a government of, by and for the people, and if people across the country find this as odious to our basic values as we do, in eight months the American public can render its own verdict on the United States Senate.”
Hawaii U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono is scheduled to address the Senate on impeachment Wednesday, according to a spokeswoman for her.
