Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellRon Johnson grinds Senate to halt, irritating many Klain on Harris breaking tie: ‘Every time she votes, we win’ How to pass legislation in the Senate without eliminating the filibuster MORE (R-Ky.) on Friday made a failed bid to adjourn the Senate and punt the debate on the Democratic coronavirus bill until Saturday.
McConnell’s move came after the Senate sat in limbo for nearly 12 hours on Friday as Democrats tried to work out a deal that could win over all 50 members of their caucus.
“They want to begin the vote-a-rama that could have been done in daylight because of their own confusion and the challenges of getting together 50 people to agree on something when they could have doing it quicker on a bipartisan basis,” McConnell said. “So rather than start the voting at five minutes to 11, I move to adjourn until 10 a.m.”
But Democrats were able to vote down the effort. In addition to controlling the majority, because Vice President Harris can break a tie, Republicans were also short a vote because Sen. Dan SullivanDaniel Scott SullivanThe Hill’s Morning Report – Presented by The AIDS Institute – Finger-pointing on Capitol riot; GOP balks at Biden relief plan Sanders votes against Biden USDA nominee Vilsack Senate confirms Vilsack as Agriculture secretary MORE (R-Alaska) flew home for a family emergency.
The effort to punt until Saturday comes after Democrats created a new record for the longest vote in modern Senate history when they left open a vote on Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersABC names new deputy political director, weekend White House correspondent Ron Johnson forces reading of 628-page Senate coronavirus relief bill on floor GOP pulling out all the stops to delay COVID-19 package MORE‘s (I-Vt.) minimum wage proposal for almost 12 hours.
Democrats left the vote open while they huddled in closed-door meetings to come up with an unemployment payment deal that moderate Sen. Joe ManchinJoseph (Joe) ManchinOvernight Defense: Capitol Police may ask National Guard to stay | Biden’s Pentagon policy nominee faces criticism | Naval Academy midshipmen moved to hotels Progressives won’t oppose bill over limits on stimulus checks Senate votes to take up COVID-19 relief bill MORE (D-W.Va.) could support.
Democrats announced that deal shortly before 8 p.m., but are still waiting on a Joint Committee on Taxationscore.
Despite McConnell’s opposition, Senate Majority Leader Charles SchumerChuck SchumerRon Johnson forces reading of 628-page Senate coronavirus relief bill on floor Senate panel splits along party lines on Becerra House Democrats’ ambitious agenda set to run into Senate blockade MORE (D-N.Y.) is pledging that the Senate will power through Friday night and likely into Saturday morning in order to wrap up the nearly $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill.
“Now that this agreement has been reached, we are going to power through the rest of the process and get this bill done,” he said. “Make no mistake: we are going to continue working until we get the job done.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that he would “absolutely” support Donald Trump if he’s the 2024 GOP nominee for president, two weeks after declaring former President Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of January 6. The Kentucky Republican said he will support any Republican who wins the nomination, even if that’s Mr. Trump.
“The nominee of the party? Absolutely,” McConnell said on Fox News when asked if he would support Mr. Trump if he became the nominee.
McConnell said the field is “wide open” and “at least four” Senate Republicans are eyeing a bid.
Only two weeks ago, the top Senate Republican verbally skewered Mr. Trump for his role in the deadly January 6 assault on the Capitol, after voting to acquit Mr. Trump of inciting the insurrection.
“Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said on February 13 on the Senate floor. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”
Mr. Trump didn’t hold back in what he thought about McConnell either, saying it was a mistake to support the Kentucky Republican in his reelection bid and calling him a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack.”
“My only regret is that McConnell ‘begged’ for my strong support and endorsement before the great people of Kentucky in the 2020 election, and I gave it to him,” the former president said in a statement. “He went from one point down to 20 points up, and won. How quickly he forgets. Without my endorsement, McConnell would have lost, and lost badly.”
Mr. Trump is set to speak Sunday at the conservative conference CPAC, which will be his first major address since he left office on January 20.
McConnell indicated that he would be open to a commission narrowly focused on security on the Hill.
“We could do something narrow that looks at the Capitol, or we could potentially do something broader to analyze the full scope of the political violence problem in this country,” McConnell added. “We cannot land at some artificial, politicized halfway point.”
McConnell’s comments underscore the steep challenge Democrats face if they hope — as Pelosi suggests — to recreate the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan review of the 2001 terrorist attacks that’s considered a model for intensive after-action reviews of nationally significant moments. Lawmakers have proposed similar “9/11 commissions” for the onset of Covid in America.
McConnell’s remarks come as two Senate committees are pressing on with a joint bipartisan investigation into the security failures that allowed a pro-Trump mob to breach the Capitol while lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
The Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees will hold a hearing next week with officials from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI — three entities that came under heavy criticism during the panels’ first hearing on Tuesday.
Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and acting D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee told senators that the Pentagon slow-walked their urgent pleas for assistance from the National Guard. They also indicated they were not informed about intelligence reports suggesting that extremist groups were gearing up for violence.
The next hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday, will feature testimony from Robert Salesses, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security; Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division; and Melissa Smislova, who leads the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
In addition, senators are expected to be briefed on Capitol security measures later Wednesday by the acting Capitol Police chief and the acting Senate sergeant-at-arms.
After a campaign in which Joe Biden expressed supreme confidence that he could bring an end to, or at least substantially curb the damage wrought by, the coronavirus pandemic, his administration’s handling of the pandemic has left much to be desired. Rewind back to last fall. Biden was giving speeches about how while he trusted vaccines in general, he didn’t trust Donald Trump, and was thus skeptical of the coronavirus vaccines in particular. Biden’s running mate, then-senator Kamala Harris, said that she’d be hesitant to take a vaccine that came out during Trump’s term. When pressed about whether she would do so if Dr. Anthony Fauci and other reputable health authorities endorsed it, she doubled down: “They’ll be muzzled; they’ll be suppressed.” By December, it was clear that the vaccines were in fact on the brink of FDA approval, and that by the time Biden and Harris took their respective positions atop the executive branch, distribution would be well underway. Biden received the Pfizer vaccine mid-month, and Harris got it just before the year’s end. It was only right that the principals of the incoming administration should be protected. But it remains the case that Biden and Harris, without basis, undermined confidence in a medical miracle for their own political benefit and then jumped to the front of the considerable line for it. After receiving the vaccine, Biden moved into the White House with a mandate to get the pandemic under control. He announced his moonshot plan for national vaccination: administering 100 million shots by his 100th day in office. This was a dishonest PR ploy. During the week of Biden’s inauguration, the U.S. averaged 983,000 vaccinations a day, meaning the administration was setting itself a benchmark it could already be assured of hitting. Naturally, the public noticed, and almost immediately Biden was forced to increase his goal: He would now be aiming for an average of 1.5 million vaccinations a day at the end of his first 100 days. Already, we’ve reached that higher target, and not because of the Biden administration’s novel efforts. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty has reported, the Biden administration’s vaccination plan includes new federal sites, but no more doses of the vaccine. This presents not an opportunity to expand vaccination efforts — there are already plenty of places where people can be inoculated — but a bureaucratic obstacle that has made things harder on the states, some of which were not even aware that additional doses would not be made available at the new sites. Even worse, yesterday’s Morning Jolt noted that there’s still a substantial gap between the number of vaccines provided by Pfizer and Moderna and the number of vaccines actually being administered: As of this morning, according to the New York Times, Moderna and Pfizer have shipped more than 70 million doses to the states, and somehow the states have gotten only 52.8 million of those shots into peoples’ arms. The Bloomberg chart has a slightly better figure, showing states have administered 54.6 million doses, out of roughly the same total. That leaves anywhere from 15.4 to 17.2 million doses either in transit or sitting on shelves somewhere. The country is vaccinating about 1.67 million people per day according to the Times data, 1.69 million per day on the Bloomberg chart. Not great. The Biden administration has been similarly lackadaisical in its approach to school reopenings. White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that its goal was to have 51 percent of schools open “at least one day a week.” This target suffers from the same problem as the vaccination target: It’s already been met, and exceeded. Around 64 percent of school districts were already offering some kind of in-person instruction when Psaki spoke. The objective, given the enormous costs of virtual instruction on students, should be to open up the remaining 36 percent and turn partial reopenings back into full-time ones. To some extent, Biden walked Psaki’s stunningly slothful goal back during a CNN town-hall event on Tuesday, saying “I think many of them [will be open] five days a week. The goal will be five days a week,” and calling Psaki’s statement a “mistake.” Questions remain, though: If it was only a mistake, why did it take a week for it to be corrected? And why is the correction so vague as to leave room for fudging? How many, exactly, constitutes “many” to the Biden administration? Biden’s expectations game is a symptom of a greater problem: He never had the plan for handling the pandemic that he said he did. His campaign-season contention that he did was always a smoke-and-mirrors act that had more to do with tone and messaging than it did policy. To cover up the absence of tangible changes that it’s brought to the table, the new administration has tried to flood the zone with already achieved objectives and then tout their achievement as accomplishments. Dishonesty has many forms, and the Biden administration has proven itself no more forthright than its predecessors, even if its deceptions are sometimes more artful.
Senate leadership announced on Monday that they have reached a deal on the framework for former President TrumpDonald TrumpDominion spokesman: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell ‘is begging to be sued’ DC officers who defended Capitol, family of Sicknick honored at Super Bowl US will rejoin UN Human Rights Council: report MORE‘s impeachment trial, which will start on Tuesday.
“For the information of the Senate, the Republican leader and I, in consultation with both the House managers and Former President Trump’s lawyers, have agreed to a bipartisan resolution to govern the structure and timing of the impending trial,” Senate Majority Leader Charles SchumerChuck SchumerOver 60 progressive groups urge Schumer to nix filibuster Booker reintroduces bill to give all newborns ,000 savings accounts Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Blumenauer aim to require Biden to declare climate emergency MORE (D-N.Y.) said from the Senate floor.
“All parties have agreed to a structure that will ensure a fair and honest Senate impeachment trial of the former president,” Schumer said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellSenate eyes speedy Trump impeachment trial Republicans look to pummel Democrats on school reopenings GOP blames White House staff for lack of COVID-19 relief deal MORE (R-Ky.) confirmed on the Senate floor that they have reached a deal, noting that it “preserves due process and the rights of both sides.”
“I’m pleased that Leader Schumer and I were able to reach an agreement on a fair process and estimated timeline for the upcoming Senate trial,” McConnell said. “It will give senators as jurors ample time to receive the case and the arguments.”
Schumer’s announcement comes after he disclosed during a press conference in New York earlier that they were finalizing an agreement.
The timeline would allow the trial to wrap up as early as next week, if both sides agree not to call witnesses.
Under the deal, the Senate will debate and vote on Tuesday on whether or not the trial is constitutional. The effort to declare the trial unconstitutional will fall short after Rand PaulRandal (Rand) Howard PaulLawmakers lay blame on Trump over riot as second impeachment trial looms Murphy: ‘I don’t think any of our job ends just because the president has left office’ Congress mulls tightening eligibility for stimulus checks MORE (R-Ky.) forced a vote on the issue late last month. Forty-four GOP senators supported his effort.
Opening arguments will start on Wednesday. Under the deal the House impeachment managers and Trump’s team will have 16 hours over two days each to present their case to the Senate.
That’s a faster pace than both the Clinton trial and the first Trump trial where both sides got 24 hours.
The deal also leaves the door open to calling witnesses. The House impeachment managers previously invited Trump to testify under oath, an offer his attorneys rejected. They haven’t yet said if they will try to get the Senate to call other witnesses.
The trial will also be paused on Saturday to accommodate a request from one of Trump’s attorneys to observe the Jewish Sabbath.
If both sides use all of their time that would set up opening arguments to wrap on Sunday.
After that the Senate is expected to have time to ask questions of both sides, as well as potential deliberations. In previous trials, senators have had two days for the question-and-answer session. According to the resolution of the trial’s rules senators will get four hours to ask questions.
Both sides will get two hours for closing arguments.
“As in previous trials, there will be equal time for senator’ questions and for closing arguments and an opportunity for the Senate to hold deliberations if it so chooses and then we will vote on the article of impeachment,” Schumer said.
The trial comes nearly five weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Though Republicans fumed after Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol as lawmakers were counting the Electoral College result, Democrats are not expected to be able to get the 17 votes needed to convict Trump.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was the latest Republican to give her a boost, saying in a statement to CNN that she had “the courage” to act on her convictions in the aftermath of her vote to impeach Trump last month on a charge he incited the deadly insurrection that ransacked Capitol Hill on January 6.
“Liz Cheney is a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them,” McConnell said. “She is an important leader in our party and in our nation. I am grateful for her service and look forward to continuing to work with her on the crucial issues facing our nation.”
The statement comes as a cross-section of GOP lawmakers — from top Republicans in Senate leadership like fellow Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso to some conservative House Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas — have publicly defended Cheney in the face of the onslaught from Trump defenders eager to see her defeated. Last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a close Trump ally, traveled to Wyoming to rally against Cheney, with the former President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., calling into the event and demanding she be defeated in next year’s primary.
The former President is focusing his political energy on targeting Cheney. According to one source, Trump has repeatedly questioned his Republican allies about efforts to remove Cheney from her leadership position and run a primary candidate against her. He has also been showing those allies a poll commissioned by his Save America PAC that purports to show that Cheney’s impeachment vote has damaged her standing in Wyoming, even urging them to talk about the poll on television.
On Capitol Hill, some Trump defenders are trying to oust her from her leadership, though it’s far from clear they have a majority in the House Republican conference to succeed in that quest. Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump, along with the votes of nine other House Republicans, is expected to be a topic of conversation when the House GOP meets behind closed doors on Wednesday. Already, some Republicans who supported Trump’s impeachment have been subject to intense backlash back home, including South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice, who was censured by his state party over the weekend.
McConnell, who voted last week along with 44 of his Senate GOP colleagues to keep alive an effort to dismiss the Senate impeachment trial on constitutional grounds, has privately told associates he believes Trump committed impeachable offenses, according to sources familiar with the conversations.
When asked by CNN last week if he believes Trump’s actions ahead of the riot amounted to impeachable conduct, McConnell sidestepped the question — and later said he was a juror and would assess the arguments. But unlike House Republicans, most Senate Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s actions, even though they’re signaling they’ll vote to acquit on the grounds that they believe the Senate shouldn’t be trying a former president.
Cheney has also received support from beyond Capitol Hill. Former President George W. Bush has made it clear that he supports her, with his chief of staff, Freddy Ford, telling CNN on Friday that Bush planned to praise her during a Saturday call with his former vice president, her father, Dick Cheney.
McConnell’s statement defending Cheney is more of a full-throated defense than the one offered by House Republican leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who said he backs Cheney but said she would have to answer to their conference for her vote.
“Look, I support her, but I also have concerns,” McCarthy said last month, days before he jaunted down to South Florida to visit the former President and claimed the two were united in attempting to take back the House next year.
McConnell hasn’t spoken to Trump since December 15.
This story has been updated with more information.
CNN’s Caroline Kelly and Michael Warren contributed to this report.
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, is proposing to push back the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial by a week or more to give the former president time to review the case.
House Democrats who voted to impeach Trump last week for inciting the 6 January Capitol attack have signaled they want a quick trial as President Joe Biden begins his term, saying a full reckoning is necessary before the country – and the Congress – can move on.
But McConnell told his fellow GOP senators on a call Thursday that a short delay would give Trump time to prepare and stand up his legal team, ensuring due process.
The Indiana senator Mike Braun said after the call that the trial might not begin “until sometime mid-February”. He said that was “due to the fact that the process as it occurred in the House evolved so quickly, and that it is not in line with the time you need to prepare for a defense in a Senate trial”.
The timing will be set by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who can trigger the start of the trial when she sends the House charges for “incitement of insurrection” to the Senate, and also by McConnell and the new Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who are in negotiations over how to set up a 50-50 partisan divide in the Senate and the short-term agenda.
Schumer is in charge of the Senate, assuming the majority leader post after Democrats won two new Senate seats in Georgia and Vice-President Kamala Harris was sworn in on Wednesday. But with such a narrow divide, Republicans will have some say over the trial’s procedure.
Democrats are hoping to conduct the proceedings while also passing legislation that is a priority for Biden, including coronavirus relief, but they would need some cooperation from Senate Republicans to do that, as well.
Schumer told reporters on Thursday that he was still negotiating with McConnell on how to conduct the trial, “but make no mistake about it. There will be a trial, there will be a vote, up or down or whether to convict the president.”
Pelosi could send the article to the Senate as soon as Friday. Democrats say the proceedings should move quickly because they were all witnesses to the siege, many of them fleeing for safety as the rioters descended on the Capitol.
“It will be soon, I don’t think it will be long, but we must do it,” Pelosi said on Thursday. She said Trump did not deserve a “get out of jail card” for his historic second impeachment just because he has left office and Biden and others are calling for national unity.
‘The mob was fed lies’: McConnell blames Trump for Capitol attack – video
Without the White House counsel’s office to defend him – as it did in his first trial last year – Trump’s allies have been searching for lawyers to argue the former president’s case. Members of his past legal teams have indicated they do not plan to join the effort, but the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham told GOP colleagues on Thursday that Trump was hiring the South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers, according to a person familiar with the call who was granted anonymity to discuss it. Bowers did not immediately respond to a message Thursday.
Prosecuting the House case will be Pelosi’s nine impeachment managers, who have been regularly meeting to discuss strategy. Pelosi said she would talk to them “in the next few days” about when the Senate might be ready for a trial, indicating the decision could stretch into next week.
Trump told thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” against the election results that Congress was certifying on 6 January just before an angry mob invaded the Capitol and interrupted the count. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the mayhem, and the House impeached the outgoing president a week later, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
Pelosi said it would be “harmful to unity” to forget that “people died here on January 6, the attempt to undermine our election, to undermine our democracy, to dishonor our Constitution”.
Following his first impeachment, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February after his White House legal team, aided by his personal lawyers, aggressively fought the House charges that he had encouraged the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid. This time around, Pelosi noted, the House was not seeking to convict the president over private conversations but for a very public insurrection that they experienced themselves and that played out on live television.
“This year the whole world bore witness to the president’s incitement,” Pelosi said.
Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No 2 Senate Democrat, said it was still too early to know how long a trial would take, or if Democrats would want to call witnesses. But he said: “You don’t need to tell us what was going on with the mob scene – we were rushing down the staircase to escape.”
McConnell, who said this week that Trump had “provoked” his supporters before the riot, has not said how he will vote. He told his GOP colleagues that it would be a vote of conscience.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has proposed to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial should start in mid-February and laid out the preferred timing during a conference call with Republican colleagues on Thursday, according to multiple sources on the call.
Included in McConnell’s proposal is a deal to begin the Senate proceedings in February so that both sides can properly prepare for Trump’s second impeachment trial, according to multiple people on the call. Schumer could be open to this proposal, giving him more time to confirm President Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees.
Sen. Mike Rounds who was on the call, said his understanding was that McConnell, R-Ky., briefed the conference before going to Schumer, D-N.Y.
“I think we know that we want to make sure that if the Democrats are going to do this impeachment, that the President has a right to due process. And in order to do that he has to prepare a case, they’ve got to set up the rules and so forth so I think it’d be very difficult to start before then,” Rounds, R-S.D., said.
Senator Mike Braun, R-Ind., also told NBC News that he thinks the trial could begin mid-February.
“Senate Republicans are strongly united behind the principle that the institution of the Senate, the office of the presidency, and former President Trump himself all deserve a full and fair process that respects his rights and the serious factual, legal, and constitutional questions at stake,” McConnell said in a statement on Thursday. “Given the unprecedented speed of the House’s process, our proposed timeline for the initial phases includes a modest and reasonable amount of additional time for both sides to assemble their arguments before the Senate would begin to hear them.”
“At this time of strong political passions, Senate Republicans believe it is absolutely imperative that we do not allow a half-baked process to short-circuit the due process that former President Trump deserves or damage the Senate or the presidency,” the statement said.
Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Schumer punted on the trial timing question when asked by reporters earlier on Thursday. Pelosi has yet to indicate when she would send the article of impeachment to the Senate, but says “soon.”
“We received Leader McConnell’s proposal that only deals with pre-trial motions late this afternoon. We will review it and discuss it with him,” said Schumer’s spokesman Justin Goodman.
When asked if the president would support moving the impeachment trial to February, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield reiterated what Biden has previously said, that he will leave it to Senate leadership to determine the mechanics and timing of the trial.
Bedingfield added that Biden wants the Senate to conduct the impeachment trial in a way that allows them to move forward with the Covid-19 relief legislation as quickly as possible.
Leigh Ann Caldwell
Leigh Ann Caldwell is an NBC News correspondent.
Julie Tsirkin
Julie Tsirkin is an associate producer for NBC News’ Capitol Hill team.
Frank Thorp V
Frank Thorp V is a producer and off-air reporter covering Congress for NBC News, managing coverage of the Senate.
Kristen Welker
Kristen Welker is chief White House correspondent for NBC News.
