Mike Lee Makes Epic Senate Floor Speech Decrying Dems For Blowing Off Mayorkas Impeachment Trial

a different set of political and professional perspectives to help you shed light on this important issue and provide insights and warnings about the quite serious implications that we so arrogantly overlook today, we mean the Senate as a whole, with 49 of us trying to get in the way. and throw out a word of caution about what we are doing and what implications it might have for the future. The warning signs are everywhere and, tragically, we have seen it in recent days with news in the last few hours that the consequences of our open border policy may touch us all with you one of our beloved and respected colleagues having lost to a dear staff member and staff member in the last few days to have lost that staff member as a result of the actions taken by an immigrant in this country who was here illegally who should not have been here that is somewhat worrying but on a level human this has so many ramifications there are so many thousands of families so many hundreds of thousands in fact so many millions and in fact dozens depending on how you look at it, hundreds of millions of Americans who have been impacted in really significant ways by the open borders policy that has been so prominent in these articles of

impeachment

more than three decades ago.

I spent two years along the US-Mexico border in the Macallen region of Texas served as a missionary and as a missionary uh one lives and works among people of all backgrounds we spend a lot of time with people of modest means and in my case I spent most of my time uh with people so humble means that uh by humble means that I had never witnessed in the United States conditions that I didn't know existed widely in the United States, including some people with dirt

floor

s. and without interior

floor

s, but in countless cases those were a little rarer but they exist or at least existed in the early 1990s, although those extreme cases were rarer almost everyone I interacted with on a day-to-day basis. where people have very humble means we live paycheck to paycheck just trying to survive and many of these people were recent immigrants, some I suspect were legal mothers, I suspect they were here illegally, it wasn't U, it wasn't standard practice at the time. for the missionaries speaking. to people to find out their immigration status we were there for different reasons but you get to know the people, you get to know their background, you get to know their concerns, one of the things that stands out from my memories of those two years is that I interacted with while I interacted with these people and I learned their customs and their language, most of them did not speak English, some of those who did not speak English had lived in the United States, most of them all their lives, in fact, there were some people especially in the older generations whose Families had been in Texas for a long time for generations and some of those older generations of people grew up speaking largely, if not exclusively, Spanish, but regardless of their immigration background or whether their family had been in Texas for generations or just for days or weeks and whether they came legally or illegally, one thing I learned about them was that there is no one who fears uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration in the same way and to the same degree as recent immigrants, especially recent immigrants.

Humble means living on or near the border between the United States and Mexico, you see, because Mr. President, it is your schools, it is your jobs, it is your neighborhoods, your homes, your children, your families, who are most directly affected. by these uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration because those are the things, Mr. President, that are right around the corner, you know that each of those things is put in grave danger every time the floodgates open and people flood our border with the United States having no legal authority to be here, every time something happens that has adverse consequences for us.

We've talked a lot about the more obvious and newsworthy implications of open borders with situations like Lake and Riley in the news, but we don't always talk about how it affects how it affects other people in more mundane places. more pedestrian ways I think we have to be aware and really pay attention to the tendency of those of us who had the privilege of serving in this body to differentiate immigrants, to differentiate anyone with a Hispanic last name, to differentiate anyone , among other things assuming that those groups of people speak monolithically or that we speak for them to the extent that we are seen as defending a position that is tolerant or even willing to embrace open borders, is not the whole picture and is one of the most shameless.

The horrible authorizations that we generate in our society assume that someone with a Hispanic last name, someone who may be a recent immigrant, would necessarily want open borders, that is simply not true and that speaks to a deep ignorance of instant messaging, uh, to the difficult situation. of these individuals when we claim that they speak monolithically, especially to the extent that we suggest, even indirectly, that they favor open borders just because of their last name or their first language or how recently they arrived in the United States or where they live in the United States United on the border, going back to the bigger picture here and what happened specifically today, when I think about the 13 and a half years I've spent in the United States Senate, I don't think so.

I do not think I can remember another day in which something with such profoundly disastrous consequences was done in this body to shatter the norms, the rules, the precedents, the legal traditions and, in this case, the constitutional principles, as this decision that was taken here today, I remembered it just before Thanksgiving in 2013 I had been in the Senate, not even three years later, just a few days before Thanksgiving, just before we went on recess Thanksgiving Day, when a group of my colleagues, all from a particular party, decided to go nuclear, the executive filibuster decided to break the rules. of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate, not by changing the rules themselves because changing the rules themselves requires 67 votes, but, by simple majority, created a new president to undermine and change the meaning of one of the rules of the Senate. get rid of the closing rule regarding the executive calendar.

After that, I spoke to many people, people from both political parties, including some from both political parties, even within this body, who serve in this body, who expressed regret about that day and concerns about where it might lead, but particularly when I heard from people who do not serve in this body, for people from all walks of life, including people of all political stripes, who recognized the profound consequences they could have and would eventually have in the United States Senate because Once Furthermore, it was a rather brazen, cynical maneuver by which the Senate broke the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate without actually changing the rules, pretending that the rules said a not b when they actually said B not. a I think it may have been Abraham Lincoln who once said that he rhetorically asked, uh, if you count a dog's tail as how many legs the dog has every time he asked this of any individual who tends to say understandably accepting the framework of his hypothetical well would be five legs, he would respond by saying no, that's not five legs, even if you call a dog's tail a leg, it's still not a leg, that's what we did when the executive stonewalled that fateful November day. 2013 in countless ways, what happened today was much worse than that because what was at stake today was not just the rules, traditions, precedents and norms of this body, rules, precedents, traditions and norms that I would add here in no time In our almost two and half century of existence it allowed for a result like the one we achieved today, which is to say, we have never had anything like this where the House of Representatives passed articles of

impeachment

and transmitted them to the United States Senate in a moment . when the accused person was neither dead nor a person who had left office nor a person ineligible for impeachment, meaning that the member of the House or Senate members of the House or Senate can be expelled by their respective organs twice. third supermajority vote, but they are not subject to impeachment per se if we eliminate those rare and narrow exceptions in which the articles of impeachment have been manipulated in a way that is known to be clearly erroneous and in which this body lacked jurisdiction on the matter at that time. articles were passed or between the time they passed the House and the time they came to the Senate, we have what I think can be characterized as an essentially perfect record, at least a consistent record of us at least having a

trial

. at least kept the basics of a

trial

in which we had arguments presented by lawyers, uh, at a minimum, by lawyers who represent the House of Representatives, they are known as impeachment managers, sometimes described colloquially as house prosecutors, at least we've heard Their arguments typically involve a presentation of evidence, by them, by the House impeachment managers, it typically involves both sides having attorneys, not just the House impeachment managers, but also a defense attorney representing the accused individual and typically evidence and arguments have been presented as to why the articles of impeachment of the U were or were not meritorious and in each of those circumstances, with the narrow exceptions that I have described as the Only Exceptions, there has been at least some finding about at least some uh of um of those articles in each case that culminated in a verdict of guilty were not guilty, so in and of themselves is a precedent and a norm and a custom and a tradition and a set of rules that we have overlooked today and that I have run roughshod over, but there is something much more at play, something much more worrying about this that I find so worrying and that is that, according to Article 1, Section 3, Clause Six, the Senate has been given exclusive power and with it sacred responsibility. and the duty to try all political trials now, as I just described, in all circumstances where there was not some jurisdictional defect and by this I mean they are bona fide jurisdictional defects where we lacked jurisdiction to move forward, We have proceeded and we have reached some sort of verdict in each of those cases, but not today, Mr.

President, I had been worried for weeks, I had heard rumors for weeks that what was going to happen today was that the leader of the majority were going to address these articles. with a certain degree of arrogant indifference and made a motion to make a motion, I was immediately convinced after looking at the rules and studying the precedent on the matter that a motion to make a motion here would be inappropriate because for the same reasons I just explained that we've never done that, we've never done anything like that closest precedent, because something like that was so out of place that it couldn't even be trusted.

I remember he was the only president who sounded like the same thing. in fact, it was very different from that in the sense that during the trial um on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, a senator had made a particular motion to do a particular thing during that trial and another senator then made that motion, there was no no motion to file. any article of impeachment in any case, after studying this, I became convinced that a motion to file it would be unprecedented and, you know, contrary to everything I thought I knew about our Rule constitutionally and otherwise for conducting trials impeachment, I also became convinced that this would be a bad precedent and that it would set a certain precedent that would suggest that it is okay if the party that holds the majority position in the United States Senate did not want to carry out a trial that was not intended What to do, I could just leave them aside like I say channeling the words of Rush's The Immortal in the song Free Will if you choose not to decide, you still have made a bad decision, if you choose to just leave aside the articles of impeachment without render a verdict of guilty or not guilty, whether pursuant to a motion to produce or otherwise, and I thought that the motion to produce would be an especially bad basis, an especially bad strategy, and a bad way to dispose of and address the articles of impeachment, it is important in this context to remember that The United States Senate has exactly three states of existence, we exist at any given moment, either in our capacity as legislators in a legislative session, in secondplace in an executive session where we consider presidential nominations and also, at times, treaties for the ratification of both executive functions carried out under our executive calendar our third state of being uh exists in this context where we must operate as a court of impeachment is It is only in our capacity as a senator sitting in a court of impeachment that we are administered a second, separate oath different from the oath we all take each time we are elected or re-elected to the Senate is a different capacity and it is a capacity that requires us to decide the case and do so on the merits of the case.

It is also unique because it is the only way in which there is a solid and unimpeachable expectation to this day that, if we do in fact have articles of impeachment over which we have subject matter jurisdiction, the case has not become moot. , where there is an expectation supported by historical tradition. president in the text of the Constitution that we will do the work that in fact according to these precedents until today that we will reach a verdict of guilty or not guilty by the time it is done, you see, those things do not exist in the other two states on our legislative calendar , there is no expectation, tradition, precedent or implication of the text of the Constitution upon which we will affirmatively act and ultimately eliminate every piece of legislation presented to the president to the United States Senate, we do not do that, we have never adopted that approach and, if we did it, we would do it.

You know, it would paralyze the place. I don't think it's physically possible nor has that ever been the expectation in the executive calendar. Sure we tend to eventually get to most of them, but there is an understanding that unless or until we confirm a particular nominee, that nominee is not confirmed, so if we get to the end of the road, the end of that Congress, the end even of a session, if that person is going to be confirmed, that person must be renominated. first and then considered by the Senate, but even then there is no guarantee as to a final vote deciding that nomination.

This is different in the context of an impeachment trial where we sit as an impeachment court, we sit as an impeachment court and by doing so we become two things that you know, in any ordinary court trial, There are two functions that a trial entails, you must have fact finders, that is a role that a jury normally plays in our system, both in civil courts and in civil cases. in criminal cases and it is necessary to have U judges for legal issues, usually performed by a judge in some cases, most commonly if the parties agreed to have factual issues decided by a judge rather than a jury and you can have everything, you know questions of fact and questions of law decided by a judge.

We fulfill both functions, we are fact finders and judges of the law relevant to the impeachment case before us. I think, Mr. President, that's the whole reason we're given a separate oath, we don't take a separate oath every time we introduce a bill or every time we get a presidential nomination or every time we get a presidential nomination. asks us to consider a treaty for ratification, but we take a separate oath every time we receive articles of impeachment, it's not just because these things are rarer than bills as they are introduced or nominations as they are received or the treaties that are presented to us for possible ratification, it is because it is sacred a responsibility in which there is an expectation supported by centuries of tradition, custom, precedent and understanding of our constitutional text that will resolve the case, we will resolve it in a way that culminate in a guilty or not guilty plea, except in these rare cases. cases where we lack subject matter jurisdiction, most commonly because the case has become moot, which is not the case in this case, the particular way we approached this today really was crazy and impossible to defend, absolutely impossible to defend on its merits.

Remember that there were two articles in these impeachment charges. Article one alleged that in um, you know of eight or nine different cases in which Secretary Mayorcas had an affirmative legal duty to detain illegal immigrants pending the adjudication of their asylum claims or their asylum applications. argument that they might be entitled to some other form of relief, including immigration parole, the Secretary of Homeland Security had an affirmative duty to detain them while those decisions were pending eight or nine different statutes require that eight or nine different statutes that he violated he deliberately did so contrary to what the statute required and in doing so, he invited and facilitated an invasion on our southern border that is unprecedented in American history, that has been dangerous, that has resulted in the commission of all kinds of heinous crimes, loss of life, loss of innocence, loss of Much property damage that occurs as a result of this is the result of your deliberate decision to not only not do the job you were hired to do and swore to do well, but of doing exactly the opposite of what the Justice Story writings mentioned a moment ago.

Justice Joseph Story, one of our first Supreme Court justices, a couple of centuries ago familiarized Amar with the Constitution at a time closer to the founding and also very familiar with the English legal background on which the Constitution was based . The Constitution was based on legal terminology incorporated from English law into the American constitutional system and it is excellent uh tretis about the constitution in section 798, explained some things about impeachable offenses and said in section 798 quote when looking at parliamentary history . of political trials it will be found that many crimes not easily definable by law and many of a purely political character have been considered crimes and misdemeanors worthy of this extraordinary remedy. quote at length this extraordinary remedy, of course, referring to impeachment, then recites a litany of things that would qualify for this and again simply noted that they don't necessarily have to be easily definable by law and are political in nature, but he identified some of those things that had been established through English legal precedent.

The English parliamentary speaker is worthy of impeachment, qualified as high crimes and misdemeanors, among other things, he identified what he called attempts to subvert fundamental laws, attempts to subvert fundamental laws, this could have wide application in all types of areas, but I can think. of few laws more fundamental to our Republic to our federal legal system than the fundamental laws that govern who can enter this country and under what circumstances, he went on to identify a number of other things that fit this definition, adding U, among others things. To say a particular thing that would meet the definition of serious and bad crimes and therefore be impeachable, would be a case where, quote, a gentleman admiral may have neglected the safeguarding of the seed, so some in The other side of the aisles have argued that, in reality, what Secretary Mayorcas did was simply not do as good a job as he should and could have done enforcing the law and that cannot be a basis for impeachment.

They argue that some of them will invoke a line of reasoning that says um maladministration, in other words, not doing your job well is not a valid basis for an impeachable offense. I'm not entirely sure that argument, even expressed in the abstract, is accurate, in fact I tend to think. which is not because the Constitution itself assigns that job to this branch of government, to the House when it evaluates whether to impeach something so impeachable and to the Senate when it evaluates whether an impeachment trial approved and presented by the House justifies conviction and removal from office, This is our job and it is just a story that is noted to include crimes of a political nature regardless of whether they would amount to independently prosecutable criminal offenses in the sense of that word in a criminal court, but in any case this Even if If you accept that reasoning, there are academics who believe that I think I remember Professor Allen Dtz, a respected Harvard Law professor who we have heard from in past impeachment proceedings.

I think he believes in this approach, but even under professor jz. approach, he is someone I have great respect for even when I disagree with him, even if you were to accept that premise, this is not just that this goes far beyond Mal's administration, it is not just that Secretary Meus does not he did it so well. a job like he could and should have and we wish he had is that he intentionally subverted what the law required and did exactly the opposite of what the law required that is impeachable it has to be impeachable and yet the majority leader is maintained Today and he and he said I raise a point of order that article one of the impeachment again article one of the impeachment is the part that deals with Secretary May Oris's decision to do exactly the opposite of what the law requires .

The majority leader continued, you know, article one of the impeachment does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a felony or misdemeanor as required by Article 2 Section 4 of the United States Constitution and therefore is unconstitutional. I I really um I don't know how it gets there and it can't get accepted by sheer force and the way you do something by sheer force here is that you produce a simple majority vote of the senators declaring impeachment equivalent to defining the story of a dog like a leg. What I found even more surprising was when, um, as surprising as that first step was, and as disappointing as it was, a simple majority of United States senators, all of the same political party (not mine, I would add), he somehow managed to overcome it by later raising the same point of order regarding article two. arguing that, you know, he said, I raised a point of order that article two of impeachment does not allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or a misdemeanor as required by Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States and is therefore, it is unconstitutional, let's remember what Article 2 was, Article Two accused Secretary Mayorcas of knowingly making false statements to Congress while Congress was carrying out its oversight responsibilities and he testified to often under oath before Congress.

Now, unfortunately, we never got to hear any evidence. On this, therefore, we were not presented with the opportunity to make a final decision on this, but instead we make the majority simply overlook all this by simply stating that if it says Dix it is because it is because we say so. is that it is not an impeachable offense even if, as has been alleged, and as managers of the House impeachment, the House prosecutors, as we sometimes call them, were denied the opportunity to try to prove that, to knowingly made false statements to Congress to say that that is not impeachable is astonishingly terrifying, we have now established a precedent in the United States Senate that if you hold a high position of trust within the United States government (a member of the Cabinet in this case) and knowingly

makes

false statements to Congress while Congress is trying to get to the truth about what it is doing in its job and whether or not it is faithfully executing, implementing and enforcing the law that Lying to Congress in that regard, even under oath, is not such an impeachable offense that precedent might suggest that "we are now effectively immunized against impeachment by doing precisely that, how are we to conduct adequate oversight if even the theoretical threat , the hypothetical potential theoretical threat of impeachment, is not on the table, seriously weakens the fabric of our Republic, certainly weakens the ability of the United States Senate to reject abuses committed by and within a coordinated branch of government, you know, when James Madison expressed it in The Federalist Papers, among other places of the federalist government 51, it was a kind of experiment, it's an exhibition, it's a sample of human nature there and in other federalist articles, it explains things like the fact that that, as continued in Federalist 51, if we, as human beings, were angels, we would not need government, if we had access to angels to run our government, We do not need all these rules to govern those responsible for government, but unfortunately we are not angels to which we do not have access to run our government, so we need rules.

Madison also believed strongly in the fact that since we are not angels, we do not have access to angels to run our government and we need these rules. You have to establish a system where power can be made to control power and establish each branch with its own set ofincentives for I have wondered how to protect against abuses of power over time, as I have watched the United States Senate, gradually but very steadily, over many decades, voluntarily give up its power. Much of this began with our work on the legislative calendar that began at Earnest, actually in the 1930s.

But continuing to this day, we have gradually been outsourcing much of our legislative power to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, we approve everything type of laws that essentially say that we will have a good law regarding subject X and we hereby delegate to a department, commission, agency or official Y the power to promulgate rules that have the force of a generally applicable federal law regarding issuing X, little by little the American people lose control over their own government. As this happens, you slowly begin to see that this diminishes the overall responsibility of the United States. government and when an agency or Department enacts a particular rule that has the force of a federal law of general application, people, understandably, predictably, very consistently come to us to complain saying this is killing us, this rule made by bureaucrats is not elected and irresponsible people are now going to shut down my business, they are going to deprive me of life, liberty or property or some combination of the three, whether I choose to comply or not, they are going to materially harm me and yet, you know, Article 1, Section 1, Clause One says that all legislative powers herein granted shall vest in a Congress of the United States which shall be composed of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

Article 1, Section 7

makes

it very clear what Article 1, Section 1 states, that is, it cannot be made a federal law. without both the House of Representatives and the Senate ascending on the same bill, they have to approve the same text of the bill and then present it to the chief executive, the president of the United States, for his signature, veto, or acquiescence , unless that formula is followed. of article 1, paragraph 7, you are supposed to be incapable of drafting a federal law. One of the most influential political philosophers of the founding generation is Charles de Monus, who observed that legislative power is itself non-delegable and that the task of law-making entails the power of law-making. not to other legislators because, as we see to this day, when these things happen when people come back to complain that administrative regulation that cares about the strength of generally applicable federal law, when it causes problems, people come and complains to us and then the members of Congress beat their chests and say, oh yeah, those barbarians at the agency committee department why didn't we want to authorize this, we just said make a good law in As for issuing X, we didn't say make a bad law and then, as expected.

Senators, the representatives say something like the following, you know what I am going to do for you voters, I am going to write you a harshly worded letter, that is what I am going to do as if that were our job in which we swore, what I had to do was write harshly worded letters, not that, of course, it's about making laws, not other legislators, you know. I keep these two stacks of documents behind my desk, one of them is small, usually a few inches long and no longer than a foot. the laws passed by Congress the previous year are only a few thousand pages, the other stack is 13 feet high during a typical year, it will reach about 100,000 pages stacked even on very thin paper, small double-sided print about 13 feet height consists of the Federal Register for the past year, the annual cumulative index of these Federal Regulations as they are promulgated as their start published for notice and comment and later, when finalized, those rules have the force of non-compliance with law federal of general application. by those can close your business it can result in huge fines in many cases it can result in your imprisonment if you do not follow them and even then they are not enacted through the formula prescribed by Article 1 Section 7 not because in that case we have not authorized the making of laws, but of other legislators, not of ourselves nor of those other legislators to whom we have assigned this task, although perhaps no matter how educated and well-intentioned, wise, specialized and well trained they are, they are not responsible to the government US. people, your name will never appear on a ballot, in fact, your name will essentially remain a secret to almost all Americans, including those who will be responsible for those laws and who may lose life, liberty, and property as a result of those things that are not right.

We all know deep down that it's not right, we know that every time our constituents bring one of these complaints to us, and we all have them in my office, it's a near-constant refrain, and yet they often precipitate the predictable harshly worded letter and not much more, in other cases, they could culminate in the presentation of a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, as fun as they may be, since they at least give us the opportunity to debate them. Those are privileged decisions, you follow the rules. of the congressional review bill, you can almost always get one of the voters to at least have the opportunity to present them here in the United States Senate and vote up or down on whether or not you want to disapprove the regulation.

However, ultimately at issue, they turned out to be unsatisfactory from a constitutional point of view in the sense that, with very narrow exceptions, they do not actually do any good because almost any Administration whose bureaucratic structures promulgate the administrative rule in question will want, for political reasons and for political reasons, a policy choice built into those regulations and, consequently, the president whose administration enacted the regulation challenged under the CRA's resolution of disapproval will almost always veto any resolution of disapproval passed by both chambers of Congress; It's very rare that that doesn't happen just with I can think of an exception from a few decades ago, the only time it works, other than that exception I'm thinking of, happens when you have control when you have a new Administration and you have regulations. that have been enacted toward the end of the previous administration, we had several of them when President Trump took office after President Obama's term, where the Obama-era regulations were ripe for CRA disapproval rulings and we were able to get were passed by both houses of Congress and then signed by President Trump those circumstances are quite rare in all other circumstances the voters of this great country those subject to these administrative regulations that are actually laws those things leave us without redress is one of the reasons why I have long advocated for us to pass a measure called the Reigns Act, if a genie appeared to me and told me that any bill now pending before the United States Congress could be passed, it would be the Reigns Act, why well, because Reigns The law would require us by statute to do what I believe the Constitution already requires, what in fact it does contemplate, which is that it is okay for administrative regulations to be promulgated, but unless or until they are affirmatively become law by both houses of Congress and then signed into law or accepted by the sitting president or in the case of a veto, um that veto is overridden by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then it can go into effect, but Before that, there are no dice I make.

I don't understand the law, these have far reaching effects, including the fact that you know you are a member of the Judiciary Committee. I and some of my colleagues tried to calculate a few years ago how many criminal offenses are on the books, how many different provisions of federal law prescribe criminal penalties and can result in a criminal conviction. We asked this question at the Congressional Research Service, um, the entity we regularly turn to for answers to questions like the ones we received the answer to. in a way that I found absolutely amazing the response that came to us from the congressional research service very talented people in the congressional service who were very good at answering these questions did a good job of doing so and yet I am convinced that they gave us the answer that was possible to achieve they said the answer is unknown and unknowable, but we know that there are at least 300,000 separately defined criminal offenses on the books, now this does not mean that on 3,000 or more than 300,000 occasions both houses of Congress passed law a separate statute that defines a criminal offense with no criminal penalties, in many of these cases one of the reasons it is so difficult to determine the number is because many of these are defined administratively, so that is the area in which the The United States Senate has been deliberately stripping itself of its responsibilities and handing them over to someone else who refuses to do the job we have been given.

We have also done it in the legislative calendar. We've done it time and time again on the executive calendar as well. schedule in which we change the law to limit law changes or, in some cases, adopt standing orders that have been adopted in subsequent iterations of the Senate that limit the number of presidential candidates requiring confirmation, so we have also narrowed our field game there. By sharing our responsibility even as the size of the federal government has inexorably increased, we have reduced our work and now we have seen it done again today in our third state of being in our third category where we operate as an impeachment court. where even here, where our work is really limited, we have a job in this area to carry out impeachment trials.

There are thousands of ways you can conduct an impeachment trial. You can hold an impeachment trial with the entire Senate. You can specialize the impeachment trial so that it is heard in the first instance by a select committee with members of both political parties, it will hear the evidence and then, after doing that, send the whole matter for a final vote to the entire Senate, you can listen to the evidence through individual Witnesses you may receive. evidence in documentary form there are a thousand different ways to conduct a trial some of which allow the trial to be carried out quite quickly others may take longer but there are a thousand ways we can do it and here as with the other two states of be seen on the legislative calendar then on the executive calendar now as we sit like a court of impeachment we have reduced our work again eliminating our responsibilities again refusing to fulfill our constitutional duties this is shameful I am ashamed that we as the Senate seem so enamored with the idea that we cannot do the things we have been given, what is especially worrying about this is that, in fact, we are a government of limited and enumerated powers, our job is not, as some people say, to govern the country.

Our job is not to make laws on any matter we consider appropriate or significant. Our job is not simply to enact legislation in any area where we think it might in some way or another be of net benefit to the American people. We are supposed to be a limited enumerated powers government charged with a few basic things. We are in charge of a uniform system of weights and measures. A system of immigration and nationality laws that regulate interstate commerce with foreign nations and Indian tribes. we are in charge of declaring war, establishing and regulating an army and navy, creating rules governing state militias, which we now describe as the National Guard, collecting money, regulating the value of money, creating bankruptcy laws, postal highways , post offices, regulate them in some cases where federal land will be used for some military purpose right that regulates what we now call the District of Columbia adopts rules governing the disposition of the territory and other property owned by the United States, so there This is one of my favorite powers of Congress involves granting letters of Mark and retaliation Mark in this case it is spelled mar QE we haven't done one of those in over a century.

I hope that at some point we will. I think we should leave it Mark and Retaliation is basically a pass issued by Congress that allows those who act under it to engage in acts of piracy on the high seas with the impunity offered by the United States if they can return with whatever loot they take. to the United States and then divide the spoils and share the spoils with the United States government, that's it, there are a few other powers of Congress here and there, but that's the bulk of what the federal government can do and Of course, we occupy the most important dominant and dangerous power within that because "As for the legislative power,we make the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws we make, deferring to our policies and enforcing the policies we enact, the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court simply interprets them not only in the abstract but interprets them in such a way . to be able to resolve disputes brought properly within the jurisdiction of the courts, disputes over the meaning of federal law, so that we obtain the most dangerous prominent dominant position and it makes sense that the founding fathers would entrust that rule only to us because we happen to be the branch of government most responsible to the people at the most regular intervals you can fire the 35 members of the house every 2 years you can fire a third of the body of the members of this body every two years and it is one of the reasons, well you know the founding fathers considered the power we wield to be the most dangerous because they subjected us to the most frequent, regular and direct assurances of accountability i.e. through elections so now we have someone who has been indicted because a law that passed that he was accused of enforcing and administering administering and implementing and executing did not do its job, although it is up to us to decide that we have countless cases where that violation of the law cannot be tried in court, such as for example In this case we referred earlier to Texas United States v.

Texas, where a majority of the United States Supreme Court against, incidentally, the brilliant descent of Judge Leo, concluded that the state of Texas did not have the capacity to address the violations of the law that deviations from the law of Secretary Mayorcas and the Biden administration, so if it is not us, which in countless cases the courts cannot do, the executive branch is not going to control the executive branch, the responsibility is our, it's our job to do this and today we failed, not just failed in the sense that we tried to do it and we didn't, most of us unfortunately try not to go out of our way to define our role as something other than to define the law as say something other than what he actually says so that we can share our responsibilities once again, shame on us, shame on those members of this body who voted to do that today.

I wonder what future generations will say about this. I wonder how many ways future generations will suffer for what we did today. I hope to shout that they will take this as a lesson in what not to do and soon move away from this terrible precedent because otherwise this will lead to tears being shed and worse things being said to us. apparently the Senate is too busy to conduct an impeachment trial just when we are about to be told that the Senate is too busy to require the federal government to obtain a warrant before recording the private communications of the American people incidentally collected and stored in Las fisa 702 databases are too busy to do those things, but I think they are going to tell us that they are not too busy to send even more money to Ukraine. where we have already sent $13 billion, we are not too busy to do that, We're not too busy to expand fisa without adding a writ petition, but apparently we're too busy to do what the Senate and only the Senate can do and what we must do under the Constitution.

Does Madam President like the Ghost of Christmas Future in Charles Dickens A Christmas Story? I hope that as we examine our future and what action today awaits us you will learn about the future of the United States and the United States Senate. I hope we can choose to leave. of this course, although I fear that our past will turn out to be our prologue. I hope that we do not further solidify and entrench this reckless and indefensible action that we took today, but I am glad that we had the opportunity today to set the record straight to make a proper record of what really happened and that well, a majority, a slim majority chose to excuse the unforgivable today some of us, almost half of us tried to stand in front of that train and stop it.

I hope this does it. It turns out to be an aberration, let us all pray that it be so. Thank you Madam President. I have the word.