No one will be busy in Washington DC on January 20, right? No social events on the calendar? According to a new memo from Mitch McConnell and given to the Washington Post, any impeachment trial of Donald Trump would begin at the earliest on that day, no sooner than 1 pm ET — an hour after Trump won’t need to be removed from office anyway.
The Senate can’t do any substantive business until January 19th by rule, the memo explains, and it would take unanimous consent to change that rule:
Of course, all this assumes that the House will impeach Trump in the first place. They can do business before January 19th, and at least one article of impeachment will come to the floor on Monday for incitement to insurrection. Nancy Pelosi would need to get a simple majority for that if she moves through regular order, but might need two-thirds if she bypasses regular order to speed things up. It’s almost impossible that Pelosi would get two-thirds in a House that had two-thirds of Republicans voting to uphold the pointless elector challenges. But going through regular order might mean that Pelosi wouldn’t get it done by the 15th either. The question of unanimous consent in the Senate might never even come up.
If not, or if a Senate Republican objects to conducting business before the 19th (and you can bet that Tommy Tuberville or Josh Hawley would), then this is what the schedule would look like, according to McConnell:
Continue reading at Hot Air.
