PORTLAND, Ore. — Hours into Day 3 of a marathon impeachment trial, Senator Jeff Merkley gave insight into a moment of American history that is both monumental and, at times, very tedious.
He spoke to KGW over the phone from the Capitol on Friday afternoon during a brief break for dinner.
KGW: We’ve seen pictures of Senators sleeping, fidgeting, standing up, etc. Are Senators taking this impeachment trial seriously?
Sen. Merkley: I think people are taking it very seriously. People are standing and stretching, they’re going to the back of the room and stretching because their backs hurt from sitting for so long. They’re trying to make sure they get glasses of water or ice so they can keep sipping on something. It is a lot of hours to sit and listen. I think people are making their best effort at it.
The outcome of the trial seems very predetermined. Does any of this even matter?
We have some very big issues at stake here. For example, this time around is the first time in American history that a President has put a blanket ban on providing documents or allowing people to testify.
It didn’t happen with Andrew Johnson. It didn’t happen with Bill Clinton. It didn’t happen with Richard Nixon. That compromises the absolute core of the idea of presidential accountability. It’s a big and important issue. But on the other hand, what we’re seeing is the partisan leadership of the Senate is not intending to pave the path for a fair and full trial.
The result of that is we’re not going to have access to documents and witnesses…. And, indeed there is an effort by the leadership on the Republican side to say, ‘He’s a Republican president, we’re going to make this short and quick and get him off the hook.’ And that’s not the responsibility of the Senate.
In that sense, they do have the majority, it does seem predetermined. It’s not the way the Senate should be behaving. We’re hoping for a miracle here, that a number of Republican Senators will say, ‘You know what, I took an oath to the Constitution, not my party. I took an oath to impartial justice, not to a rigged trial.’ And will, in the end, vote to say, ‘no, we’re going to have a full and fair trial.’
If the evidence against the President is overwhelming and the Senate still votes to acquit, what does that mean for the country moving forward?
If that’s what happens, then it’s another symbol or moment where Americans have to realize we need major reform in our country. We have gerrymandering that the Supreme Court has given the green light to. We have the crushing of the Voting Rights bill by, again, the Supreme Court, we need a new Voting Rights Act.
We have Citizens United, which is concentrated power, the exact opposite of the underlying theory of our Constitution. And now we have the basic premise that a President is not above the law being challenged in this instance, because there is not a Justice Department that will prosecute misbehavior and, if impeachment is taken off the table by the majority in the Senate, then a President is above the law and that’s what we’re seeing right now. Use, then, the election this coming year to elect folks who are going to restore the vision of our Constitution.
Is the Senate broken?
The Senate is profoundly broken. The two things that have changed between the time that I first came here as an intern for Oregon Senator Hatfield and now is … the power of a Senator was you could put any issue on the floor of the Senate through an amendment or a bill and have it debated. And that’s gone. That has been completely wiped out by Mitch McConnell.
The second is, virtually everything passed by majority, so you had the basic principal of democracy, which is that the will of the majority is not subverted to the will of the minority. That has gone under the extensive use of the supermajority, or as we call it “the McConnell Veto.”
I’m working very hard to have conversations with my colleagues, saying we have to restore the Senate to be an effective legislative body. That means we have to make use of a supermajority, otherwise known as a filibuster, a very rare event, as it was in the past. Or perhaps get rid of it altogether. We’ve got to restore the ability of each Senator, every minority Senator, every majority Senator, to fully participate in a debate and put issues on the floor. I’m hoping we can reform it. But we’re up against very strong forces that don’t want it reformed. I can’t predict right now whether we’ll be successful.
