Impeachment Trial Could Begin by Thanksgiving –

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, Republican from Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Facebook

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Congress returned to the nation’s capital after a fall recess on Tuesday and immediately got to work rebuking President Donald J. Trump for his sudden military withdrawal from Syria, while Republican Senators are increasingly being asked to take a stand on the ongoing impeachment investigation in the House.

When asked where he stood on the impeachment investigation on Wednesday outside his office in the Russell Senate Office Building, U.S. Senator Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa, Alabama — a lion in the upper chamber who could easily command the 20 Republican votes it would take to convict Trump in an impeachment trial and vote to remove him from office with no appeal — declined to take a stance yet, keeping his power dry in case there is a trial.

“I’ve been through that before,” Mr. Shelby said about impeachment when informed of a press conference held by the Alabama Republican Party last week demanding that junior Senator and Democrat Doug Jones take a stand on the issue.

“I’ll be sitting on the jury on that,” Senator Shelby said, if the House votes to send articles of impeachment to the Senate for a vote.

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Meanwhile just across the street in the U.S. Capitol Building, Republicans and Democrats in the House delivered a stinging bipartisan condemnation of the president for his decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, registering broad opposition “to a move that has thrown the region into bloody chaos and unraveled Middle East policy,” according to the New York Times.

In a bipartisan vote of 354 to 60, the House passed a largely symbolic resolution voicing opposition to Trump’s acquiescence to the Turkish assault against the Kurds, who have been crucial American allies in the fight against the radical Muslim terrorist group ISIS. The ground abandoned by the U.S. military was quickly taken over by Russian forces.

“At President Trump’s hands, American leadership has been laid low, and American foreign policy has become nothing more than a tool to advance his own interests,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, a Democrat from New York and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced the resolution. “Today we make clear that the Congress is a coequal branch of government and we want nothing to do with this disastrous policy.”

The measure admonishes Trump’s withdrawal as “beneficial to adversaries of the United States government” including Russia, Syria and Iran, and calls on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to immediately end unilateral military action in northern Syria.

A companion measure in the Senate, sponsored by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, was introduced in the upper chamber on Tuesday and is scheduled for a vote soon.

The rebuke of the president’s actions was supported by 129 Republicans, including all three of the party’s House leaders, while only 60 opposed it. Three Republicans, Chip Roy of Texas, Jody B. Hice of Georgia and Bob Gibbs of Ohio, simply voted present, along with independent Justin Amash from Michigan.

At the White House after the vote, Trump lashed out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi behind closed doors.

“That vote, the size of the vote — more than two to one of the Republicans voted to oppose what the president did — probably got to the president, because he was shaken up by it,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had said he would be the one to stand in the way of impeachment of Trump, opened his weekly news conference on Wednesday by expressing his “gratitude to the Kurds.”

“I’m sorry that we are where we are,” he said.

After Trump said Wednesday that Turkey’s invasion into Syria has “nothing to do with us” and that the Kurds “are no angels,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina, called it “an astonishing statement which I completely and totally reject.”

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 ranking Republican, was also quoted from Twitter as saying: “Impossible to understand why @realDonaldTrump is leaving America’s allies to be slaughtered and enabling the return of ISIS.”

Hawkish members of Congress such as Cheney and Graham, as well as Democratic leaders in the House, are preparing additional legislative action to punish the Turks’ incursion. Graham introduced a sanctions package with Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, that would impose harsher sanctions on Turkey than the White House has levied, including the prohibition of American military assistance and the freezing of the American assets of Erdogan and other Turkish leaders.

In other action in the House, Michael McKinley, a former top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, testified to Congress on Wednesday that he resigned due to mounting frustrations over the Trump administration’s sidelining of career diplomats working on Ukraine policy and its failure to support them in the face of the impeachment inquiry, according to people familiar with the closed-door testimony who confided in the New York Times.

He is said to have described his disappointment with how politicized the State Department had become under President Trump, saying that the last straw for him was the ouster of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine whom Trump ordered home on the first available flight and then fired her.

Impeachment Trial By Thanksgiving?

Apparently the impeachment inquiry is moving right along and could end up in a trial this year, before Christmas.

According to reporting from the Washington Post, McConnell is telling Republican senators that an impeachment trial is expected to begin around Thanksgiving, and that he will expect Senators to meet six days a week during the trial.