U.S. House sends impeachment article to Senate, triggering trial

UPDATE: WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. House impeachment case against Donald Trump has been delivered to the Senate for his upcoming trial.

House Democratic prosecutors made the ceremonial walk across the Capitol late Monday to deliver the charge of incitement of insurrection, but Republican senators are easing off their criticism of the former president.

It's an early sign of Trump’s enduring sway over the party, even out of office. Instead, Republicans are presenting a tangle of Republican legal arguments against the legitimacy of the trial, and they're questioning whether Trump’s repeated demands to overturn the Joe Biden’s election really amounted to incitement.

The trial is to begin in two weeks.

ORIGINAL REPORT: WASHINGTON, DC -- The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump gets in motion Monday evening (approx. 5 p.m. MT) when the U.S. House impeachment managers will walk the impeachment article to the U.S. Senate, even though the substance of the trial has been put off for another two weeks.

The House's transmission of the single impeachment article is the first of several ceremonial functions of the trial that will be completed this week, before the Senate will turn back to confirming President Joe Biden's Cabinet and potentially taking up the President's Covid-19 relief package.

There are still many questions about the looming impeachment trial, including how long the trial will go and whether any witnesses will be called.

One of the questions swirling ahead of the trial was who would preside over it. While Chief Justice John Roberts presided over Trump's first impeachment trial, he's not expected to do so this time, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Instead, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the President pro tempore of the Senate, is expected to preside instead, the sources said.

The Constitution says the chief justice presides when the person facing trial is the current president of the United States, but senators preside in other cases, one source said.

The scheduling of the trial itself was resolved after a week's worth of uncertainty over when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would send the article to the Senate, thanks to a deal reached between Senate leaders on Friday.

Under the agreement, Trump's legal team and the House managers will have two weeks to exchange pre-trial briefs after the article is transmitted to the Senate on Monday.

The House impeachment managers will walk the article from the House to the Senate on Monday evening, and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead impeachment manager, will read the article on the floor. On Tuesday, senators will be sworn in for the trial as jurors. Then there will be a two-week period for pre-trial briefs, and the trial itself will get underway the week of February 8.

The deal gives something both the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who are still at odds over a power-sharing agreement in the 50-50 Senate. The schedule gives Trump's legal team time to prepare for the trial, after he only hired a lawyer, South Carolinian Butch Bowers, last week.

For Schumer and the Biden administration, the two-week break allows for more of Biden's Cabinet to be confirmed, as all other Senate business will stop once the trial gets underway, after Republicans rejected agreeing to split the Senate's days.

Republicans increasingly believe there's virtually no path to Trump's conviction in the Senate, which would require 17 GOP members to join with Democrats for a two-thirds vote. They've argued both that the trial itself is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer President -- legal scholars disagree, though there's no precedent -- and that pushing forward with impeachment now is divisive.

"I think the trial is stupid, I think it's counterproductive. We already have a flaming fire in this country, it's like taking a bunch of gasoline and pouring it on top of the fire," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said on "Fox News Sunday."

But Democrats argue there has to be accountability for the President after he incited the rioters who ransacked the Capitol on January 6 in an effort to stop Congress from enacting a peaceful transfer of power.

"It was a dual attack on our capitol in a joint session of congress on the very day we were completing our constitutional obligation to certify the electors," said Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, one of the nine Democratic House impeachment managers. "It is an extraordinarily heinous presidential crime, and we must move forward."

Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump when the House voted earlier this month to convict him on a single article, incitement of insurrection. A handful of Senate Republicans are likely to vote to convict him, too, even if it's short of the number required to convict him and bar him from running for office again.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Republican who voted to convict Trump in the first impeachment trial, said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that it was "pretty clear" that holding the trial was constitutional, pushing back on the argument coming from some of his Senate GOP colleagues that would give them a reason to acquit Trump.

"I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offense. If not, what is?" Romney said of Trump's actions inciting the pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol.

On Sunday, Leahy hinted at the prospect that he would preside, saying it was a "real possibility" and that he'd been preparing in case he had to take on the role.

"I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours my staff and I have gone over the Constitution procedure, because it appears I may well be the one presiding over the trial," Leahy said on MSNBC.