From Daily Kos: McConnell and his Republicans cooking up tricks to give gloss of legitimacy to impeachment trial
By JOAN McCARTER
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appears to have navigated his way out of an automatic motion to dismiss the House's impeachment. McConnell played along with the efforts of some of the conference's maniacs, signing onto a resolution to change the Senate rules to allow it to dismiss the articles before the House sent them over. Which is constitutionally dubious, at best, but when has that bothered McConnell?
Now that the articles are definitely coming this week, however, he has to moderate a bit to make the other squeaky wheels in the conference happy. That means allowing them to posture on the possibility of having witnesses. At the outset, McConnell is all but dismissing the notion. "If the existing case is strong, there's no need for the judge and the jury to reopen the investigation," he said Tuesday. "If the existing case is weak, House Democrats should not have impeached." He also said that it's "Bizarro-world" for Democrats to suggest anything less than a trial that didn't go beyond what the House includes in its prosecution is a cover up. Never mind that he's been facilitating the Trump administration's obstruction of Congress for months.