OPINION:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a quick floor statement, shot down his colleague Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s demand that four witnesses with knowledge of Ukraine matters come to the chamber and give testimony on impeachment.
That’s one way to pull the door closed on a circus show.
Schumer, over the weekend, in a letter and with emotion-hyped pleas, called on McConnell to call to the floor White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, White House aide Rob Blair, the Office of Management and Budget’s Michael Duffy and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
But hear ye, hear ye.
The demand itself is out of order.
It’s not the Senate’s job to call witnesses. It’s the House’s. And the House, as anybody this side of the planet has learned, did a poor job of producing witnesses who could testify to any impeachable offenses against President Donald Trump. The best the Democrats brought were witnesses — including an attorney who acted first as witness and then as questioner — who only gave he-said, she-said, we-all-thought-the-president-may-have-meant type testimony.
Hardly the stuff of impeach, impeach, impeach.
So now the Democrats in the Senate want to up their chances of getting a conviction — by staging a trial by media with fresh faces.
McConnell put the stopper on it.
We’re not conducting a “fishing expedition” here, McConnell said.
“The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury, to hear a trial,” he said, “not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it.”
Thank goodness adults are holding the reigns in the Senate.
“Look, most people understand what the democratic leader is really after … [to] lock in live witnesses,” McConnell said.
To advance the impeachment narrative ever closer toward election days.
To use the Democratic friendlies in the media to push this president — this duly elected, chosen-by-the-people president — from the White House and topple his administration.
To do whatever it takes to distract from the fact the Democratic Party simply has no candidate on the campaign trail who can beat Trump and halt his reelection.
And ultimately — to upset law and order and flip right for wrong, so that, going forward, the left has yet another opportunity to come into the created chaos with some sort of Big Government solution.
Is that pretty much what “the democratic leader is really after?”
Indeed.
Let’s get the business of impeachment over quickly — and begin the business of dismantling Democratic lies and deceptions.
The FISA warrant investigation awaits.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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