Lisa Murkowski Whirls on the House

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The New York Sun

As the senators unburdened themselves in respect of impeachment, the most riveting speech turned out to be by Lisa Murkowski. Other senators got closer to our own sentiments — Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, say, who was for acquittal without handwringing, or James Inhofe, a plain-spoken Sooner. It was, though, the elegant Alaskan who whirled on the “rotted” foundation of the House of Representatives.

Now that’s a point that deserves to be made. It’s not that Senator Murkowski is an apologist for President Trump. “The President’s behavior,” she averred, “was shameful and wrong.” By our lights that was never established. She has a different opinion. She reckons Mr. Trump’s “personal interests do not take precedent over those of this great nation.” So she let him have it in no uncertain terms.

Neither did Ms. Murkowski spare the Senate, which she thinks deserves to be ashamed of the “rank partisanship” in its hallowed chamber. She went on a tear about how the Senators — we took this to be a dig at the minority leader, Chuck Schumer — were playing to the press. Few in the chamber kept an open mind, she claimed. She noted that calls for impeachment went up but 19 minutes after Mr. Trump was sworn.

Ms. Murkowski was part, she said, of a small group that worked on the process by which the Senate would conduct the trial. She allowed as how they sought to secure “a fair and honest and a transparent structure for the trial,” one based on the proceeding against President Clinton. She reckons the structure they erected “should have been sufficient.” But, she cavilled, the “foundation upon which it rested was rotted.”

What she meant is that the “House rushed through what should have been one of the most serious and consequential undertakings.” Instead, it pursued an “artificial, self-imposed deadline.” It was, she noted, a stark contrast to the long investigations that went into the Nixon and Clinton cases. “The House failed in its responsibilities,” she said in a blunt indictment of Speaker Pelosi and her camarilla.

One can say that didn’t matter, but Mrs. Murkowski was one of the Republican members of the so-called jury who was leaning toward convicting the President. Mrs. Pelosi needed them. Ms. Murkowski, though, was so disgusted by the House that she wouldn’t even support calling more witnesses. She has now made it clear that she will vote for acquittal because the foundation of the case was rotten from the start.

Ms. Murkowski was particularly pointed in her denunciation of partisanship. George Washington would have loved it. She denounced those who reckoned the only way the trial could have been fair was if Mr. Trump were convicted. She suggested the whole proceeding was poisoned by Mrs. Pelosi’s month-long delay in sending the articles of impeachment over to the Senate. That is when “the demon of faction extended his scepter.”

The Alaskan also gave the heave-ho to “a careless media” that “cheerfully tried to put out the fires with gasoline.” Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, we say. It was, nonetheless, a bracing speech, all the more so when contrasted with the way Ms. Murkowski collapsed during the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. It would do Mrs. Pelosi some good to take the time to listen to Ms. Murkowski’s remarks from beginning to end.


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