Impeachment

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have long maintained that most, if not all, of the most serious and vexing problems within our Federal Government can be traced to a deviation from the twin core structural protections of the Constitution.

There are two of these protections--one that operates along a vertical axis; the other, a horizontal.

The vertical protection we call federalism, which states a very simple fact: that in the American system of government, most power is to be reserved to the States respectively, or the people, where it is exercised at the State and local level. It is only those powers enumerated in the Constitution, either in article I, section 8 or elsewhere, that are made Federal, those things that the Founding Fathers appropriately deemed unavoidably, necessarily national or that we have otherwise rendered national through a subsequent constitutional amendment.

As was the case when James Madison wrote Federalist No. 45, the powers reserved to the States are numerous and indefinite, while those that are given to the Congress to be exercised federally are few and defined--few and defined powers, the Federal Government; numerous and indefinite reserved for the States.

The horizontal protection operates within the Federal Government itself, and it acknowledges that we have three coequal, independent branches within the Federal Government: one that makes the laws, one that executes the laws, and one that interprets the laws when people can't come to an agreement and have an active, live dispute as to the meaning of a particular law in a particular case or controversy.

Sadly, we have drifted steadily, aggressively from both of these principles over the last 80 years. For roughly the first 150 years of the founding of our Republic and of the operation of our constitutional structure, we adhered pretty closely to them, but over the last 80 years or so, we have drifted steadily. This has been a bipartisan problem. It was one that was created under the broad leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike and, in fact, in Senates and Houses of Representatives and White Houses of every conceivable partisan combination.

We have essentially taken power away from the American people in two steps--first, by moving power from the State and local level and taking it to Washington, in violation of the vertical protection we call federalism; and then a second time, moving it away from the people's elected lawmakers in Washington to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats placed within the executive branch of government but who are neither elected by the people nor accountable to anyone who is electable. Thus, they constitute essentially a fourth branch of government within our system, one that is not sanctioned or contemplated by the Constitution and doesn't really fit all that well within its framework.

This has made the Federal Government bigger and more powerful. It has occurred in a way that has made people less powerful. It has made government in general and in particular, this government, the Federal Government, less responsive to the needs of the people. It has been fundamentally contrary to the way our system of government operates.

What, one might ask, does any of this have to do with impeachment? Well, in my opinion, everything--or at least a lot. This distance that we have created in these two steps--moving power from the people to Washington and within Washington, handing it to unelected lawmakers or unelected bureaucrats--has created an amount of anxiety among the American people. Not all of them necessarily recognize it in the same way that I do or describe it with the same words, but they know something is not right. They know it when their Federal Government requires them to work many months out of every year just to pay their Federal taxes, only to be told later that it is not enough and hasn't been enough for a long time since we have accumulated $22 to $23 trillion in debt, and when they come to understand that the Federal Government also imposes some $2 trillion in regulatory compliance costs on the American people.

This harms the poor and middle class. It makes everything we buy more expensive. It results in diminished wages, unemployment, and underemployment. On some level, the American people feel this. They experience this. They understand it. It creates anxiety. It was that very anxiety that caused people to want to elect a different kind of leader in 2016, and they did. It was this set of circumstances that caused them to elect Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, and I am glad they did because he promised to change the way we do things here, and he has done that.

But as someone who has focused intently on the need to reconnect the American people with their system of government, Donald Trump presents something of a serious threat to those who have occupied these positions of power, these individuals who, while hard-working, well- intentioned, well-educated, and highly specialized, occupy these positions of power within what we loosely refer to as the executive branch but is in reality an unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government.

He has bucked them on many, many levels and has infuriated them as he has done so, even as he is implementing the American people's wishes to close that gap between the people and the government that is supposed to serve them.

He has bucked them on so many levels, declining to defer to the opinions of self-proclaimed government experts who claim that they know better than any of us on a number of levels.

He pushed back on them, for example, when it comes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--or FISA, as it is sometimes described-- when he insisted that FISA had been abused in efforts to undermine his candidacy and infringe on the rights of the American people. When he took that position, Washington bureaucrats predictably mocked him, but he turned out to be right.

He called out the folly of engaging in endless nation-building exercises as part of a two-decade-long war effort that has cost this country dearly in terms of American blood and treasure. Washington bureaucrats mocked him again, but he turned out to be right.

He raised questions with how U.S. foreign aid is used and sometimes misused throughout the world, sometimes to the detriment of the American people and the very interests that such aid was created to alleviate. Washington bureaucrats mocked him, but he turned out to be right.

President Trump asked Ukraine to investigate a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. He momentarily paused U.S. aid to Ukraine while seeking a commitment from the then newly elected Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, regarding that effort. He wanted to make sure that he could trust this recently elected President Zelensky before sending him the aid. Within a few weeks, his concerns were satisfied, and he released the aid. Pausing briefly before doing so isn't criminal. It certainly isn't impeachable. It is not even wrong.

Quite to the contrary, this is exactly the sort of thing the American people elected President Trump to do. He would and has decided to bring a different paradigm to Washington, one that analyzes things from how the American citizenry views the American Government.

This has in some respects, therefore, been a trial of the Washington, DC, establishment itself but not necessarily in the way the House managers apparently intended. While the House managers repeatedly invoked constitutional principles, including separation of powers, their arguments have tended to prove the point opposite of the one they intended.

Yes, we badly need to restore and protect both federalism and separation of power, and it is my view that the deviation from one contributes to the deviation from the other. But here, in order to do that, we have to respect the three branches of government for what they are, who leads them, how they operate, and who is accountable to whom.

For them to view President Trump as somehow subservient to the career civil servant bureaucratic class that has tended to manage agencies within the Federal Government, including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, individuals in the White House, and individuals within the State Department, among others, is not only mischaracterizing this problem, it helps identify the precise source of this problem.

Many of these people, including some of the witnesses we have heard from in this trial, have mistakenly taken the conclusion that because President Trump took a conclusion different from that offered by the so-called interagency process, that that amounted to a constitutionally impeachable act. It did not. It did nothing of the sort.

Quite to the contrary, when you actually look at the Constitution itself, it makes clear that the President has the power to do what he did here. The very first section of article II of the Constitution-- this is the part of the Constitution that outlines the President's authority--makes clear that ``[t]he executive Power [of the United States Government] shall be vested in the President of the United States.''

It is important to remember that there are exactly two Federal officials who were elected within the executive branch of government. One is the Vice President, and the other is the President.

The Vice President's duties, I would add, are relatively limited. Constitutionally speaking, the Vice President is the President of the Senate and thus performs a quasi-legislative role, but the Vice President's executive branch duties are entirely bound up with those of the President's. They consist of aiding and assisting the President as the President may deem necessary and standing ready to step into the position of the Presidency should it become necessary as a result of disability, incapacitation, or death. Barring that, the entire executive branch authority is bound up within the Presidency itself. The President is the executive branch of government, just as the Justices who sit across the street themselves amount to the capstone of the judicial branch, just as 100 Senators and 435 Representatives are the legislative branch.

The President is the executive branch. As such, it is his prerogative, within the confines of what the law allows and authorizes and otherwise provides, to decide how to execute that. It is not only not incompatible with that system of government, it is entirely consistent with it--indeed, authorized by it.

A President should be able to say: Look, we have a newly elected President in Ukraine.

We have longstanding allegations of corruption within Ukraine. Those allegations have been well-founded in Ukraine. No one disputes that corruption is rampant in Ukraine.

A newly elected President comes in. This President or any President in the future decides: Hey, we are giving a lot of aid to this country--$391 million for the year in question. I want to make sure that I understand how that President operates. I want to establish a relationship of trust before taking a step further with that President. So I am going to take my time a little bit. I am going to wait maybe a few weeks in order to make sure we are on a sure footing there.

He did that. There is nothing wrong with that.

What is the response from the House managers? Well, it gets back to that interagency process, as if people whom the American people don't know or have reason to know because those people don't stand accountable to the people--they are not elected by the people; they are not really accountable to anyone who is in turn elected by the people-- the fact that those people involved in the interagency process might disagree with a foreign policy decision made by the President of the United States and the fact that this President of the United States might take a different approach than his predecessor or predecessors does not make this President's decisions criminal. It certainly doesn't make them impeachable. It doesn't even make them wrong.

In the eyes of many and I believe most Americans--they want a President to be careful about how the United States spends money. They want the United States to stop and reconsider from time to time the fact that we spend a lot of money throughout the world on countries that are not the United States. We want a President of the United States to be able to exercise a little bit of discretion in pushing pause before that President knows whether he can trust a newly elected government in the country in question.

So to suggest here that our commitment to the Constitution; to suggest here, as the House managers have, that our respect for the separation of powers within the constitutional framework somehow demands that we remove the duly elected President of the United States is simply wrong. It is elevating to a status completely foreign to our constitutional structure an entity that the Constitution does not name. It elevates a policy dispute to a question of high crimes and misdemeanors. Those two are not the same thing.

At the end of the day, this government does, in fact, stand accountable to the people. This government is of, by, and for the people. We cannot remove the 45th President of the United States for doing something that the law and the Constitution allow him to do without doing undue violence to that system of government to which every single one of us has sworn an oath.

We have sworn to uphold and protect and defend that system of government. That means standing up for the American people and those they have elected to do a job recognized by the Constitution.

I will be voting to defend this President's actions. I will be voting against undoing the vote taken by the American people some 3\1/2\ years ago. I will be voting for the principle of freedom and for the very principles that our Constitution was designed to protect.

I urge all of my colleagues to reject these deeply factually and legally flawed Articles of Impeachment and to vote not guilty.

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