Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to ensure an “honest, fair” trial in the Senate by withholding the articles of impeachment, while Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher said Pelosi is “undermining” the case against President Trump.
The two lawmakers appeared in separate interviews Sunday on “UpFront,” produced in partnership with WisPolitics.com.
Moore, a Milwaukee Democrat, said withholding the two articles of impeachment that passed the House last week isn’t a strategy “as much as it is an inquiry about whether this is going to be a fair trial.”
“I think that Nancy Pelosi wants to honor an honest, fair process, and wants to know what the parameters will be,” Moore said.
Gallagher, a Green Bay Republican, took the opposite view.
“I think by withholding the articles of impeachment, not transmitting them to the Senate, and shutting down Congress and having everyone leave town before they even name managers for the Senate impeachment trial, Pelosi is undermining the entire case for impeachment,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher voted with other House Republicans against impeachment.
“This is the first impeachment in American history, in over 200 years, that did not involve the accusation of an actual crime, so we’ve lowered the standard in that respect. This is also the first impeachment that has been purely partisan,” Gallagher said.
He said the “common sense” position would be to let voters “adjudicate our differences through the ballot box” in the November 2020 election.
But Moore said Trump deserves impeachment and removal from office.
“They’ve accused us of impeaching him simply because we have policy differences with him, or that we’re impeaching him because we don’t like him. It’s true that we have policy differences with the president. It’s true, very true, that we don’t like him. But this is not about policy differences. This is about a corrupt president who tried to bribe a foreign government into interfering with our 2020 election. And unfortunately, this is a pattern of behavior,” she said.
See more from the program:
http://www.wisn.com/upfront
