The Senate convenes as a court of impeachment at 1 p.m. Tuesday, with debate on the structure and rules of the proceedings.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had said he would use President Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999 as a model for Trump’s trial.
But the resolution McConnell released on Monday to set the rules for Trump’s trial differs from the approach adopted for Clinton — "particularly in the ruthlessly tight timetable and in the treatment of House evidence,” says Bloomberg.
McConnell's four-page resolution has to be voted on as one of the first orders of business.
Although House managers and Trump's team both would get 24 hours to make their arguments, the same as in Clinton's trial, they would have to use that time within two days per side.
At the Clinton impeachment trial, the initial ground rules said the House record, including the publicly available materials produced by the House Judiciary Committee, would be admitted into evidence, printed and made available to senators.
But McConnell’s proposed rules don’t automatically accept the record compiled by the House, although it still would be printed and distributed. A vote would be held later in the trial on whether to admit it into the record. A senior Republican leadership aide says this is because of a lack of due process for the president in the House proceedings.
The resolution pushes off any votes on witnesses until later in the process, rather than up front, as Democrats demanded. But McConnell’s plan on witnesses lines up with the organizing resolution that set the structure of Clinton’s trial, says The Associated Press.
After the four days of opening arguments, senators would be allowed up to 16 hours for questions to the prosecution and defense, followed by four hours of debate. Only then would there be votes on whether or not to call other witnesses.
At the end of deliberations, the Senate would vote on each impeachment article.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., says McConnell's proposal is a "national disgrace," and is vowing to try to change it on the floor on Tuesday.
“After reading his resolution, it’s clear Senator McConnell is hell-bent on making it much more difficult to get witnesses and documents and intent on rushing the trial through," Schumer says in a statement.
Over the weekend, House Democrats laid out their case, and Trump’s legal team issued its response.
The House’s 111-page brief outlined the prosecutors’ narrative, starting from Trump’s phone call with Ukraine and relying on the private and public testimony of a dozen witnesses — ambassadors and national security officials at high levels of government — who raised concerns about Trump's actions.
The House prosecutors wrote: “The only remaining question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their constitutional Oaths.”
Trump's team called the two articles of impeachment “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president.”
The Trump team encouraged lawmakers to reject “poisonous partisanship” and “vindicate the will of the American people” by rejecting both articles of impeachment approved by the House.
Here is the text of McConnell's resolution.
Here are the texts of the House brief and the Trump team's response.