Hawaii U.S. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz voted Wednesday to convict President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, with Hirono alleging in a Senate floor speech that Trump is a danger to the nation.
“If we let Donald Trump get away with extorting the president of another country for his own personal benefit, the Senate will be complicit — complicit — in his next corrupt scheme,” Hirono said in an eight-minute speech shortly after 8 a.m. Hawaii time. “Which country will he bully or invite to interfere in our elections next? Which pot of taxpayer money will he use as a bribe to further his political schemes?”
Trump was impeached by the Democratic-run U.S. House, but there was little doubt he would be acquitted Wednesday in a vote in the Republican-dominated Senate.
Senate Republicans refused to allow witnesses to be called in Trump’s trial. Hirono, who is a lawyer, suggested their defense amounted to little more than a shrug.
“The president’s lawyers could not refute the House’s case,” Hirono told her colleagues. “Instead they ultimately resorted to the argument that even accepting the facts as presented by the House managers, Donald Trump’s conduct is not impeachable. It’s what I’ve called the ‘He did it, so what?’ argument.”
“Many of my Republican colleagues are using the ‘so-what’ argument to justify their votes to let the president off the hook,” even as some GOP members use words such as “inappropriate,” “wrong,” and “improper,” to describe Trump’s actions, Hirono said.
“Donald Trump was already a danger to this country,” she said. “We’ve seen it in his policy decisions, from taking away health care from millions of Americans to threatening painful cuts to Social Security and Medicare, to engaging in an all-out assault on immigrants in this country, but today we’re called on to confront a completely different type of danger, one that goes well beyond the significant policy differences I have with this president.”
On Monday, Schatz warned his Senate colleagues that the supposed “trial” in the Senate with no witnesses actually amounted to a “cover up.”
“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.
“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.”
