of the them peach made of donald john trump, president of the united states, now pending to do impartial justice according to the constitution of the law so help you god? the secretary rolled out the name of the senator who has just taken the oath and will present the oath to him for signatures. >> the sergeant and arms will make the proclamation. all persons are commanded to keep silent the senator of the united states is sitting with the trial of the articles of impeachment exhibited by the house of representatives donald john trump president of the united states. >> the majority is recognize. >> for the information of all senators the trial briefs filedd yesterday have been printed and are now on each senators desk. >> they are now printed for the journal january 16, 2020 the summons issued on january 16, january 16, 2020 the following documents received by the secretary of the senate for printing in the senate journal in the order january 16, 2020 the answer of donald john trump of the president of united states to the articles of impeachment rep purported against him received bype the secretary of the senate januar january 182020. the trial brief in the house of the representatives received by the secretary january 182020 the brief received by the secretary of the senate on january 20t enjanuary 20th, 2020, recitation of the house of representatives received by the secretary of the senate jan. and the rebuttal refiled by the house of representatives received by the secretary of the senate january 21, 2020. without objection the documents will be printed in the congressional record. i know the presence in the chamber on counsel for the president of the united states. >> mister chief justice. >> the majority leader is recognize. >> asking privileges for close section agreed to by both sides and to be inserted in the record. and with unanimous consent. >> without objection. >> it is debatable by parties for two hours equally divided senator schumer will send an amendment to the desk once it has been reported we will have a brief recess. when we reconvene senator schumer's amendment will be debatedd by the parties for two hours. and then we will table the amendment. i send the resolution to the desk and ask that it be read. >>. >> asking for the resolution for those procedures for the articles of impeachment against donald john trump, president ofenre the unid states. and the house of representatives shall file from the secretary of senate with those materials submitted to or produced by the house judiciary committee including transcripts of public hearings and printed by the house of representatives are the house judiciary committee pursuant to the house resolution. the materials in this record would be admitted into evidence subject to any hearsay for any objection all those pursuant to this paragraph are printed and made available to all parties. and 9:00 a.m. on january 22n january 22nd, 2020 to file al motion permitted under the rules of impeachment with a motion to subpoena witnesses or documents or any other evidentiary motions responses to any such motion shall be filed no later than 11:00 a.m. wednesday january 22nd, 2020. all materials filed pursuant to this paragraph would be printed and made available to taboth parties. arguments of such motion on wednesday january 22nd, 2020 and each side has determined the number of persons to make the presentation following which the senate shall deliberate under the impeachment rules permit following the disposition no motions are made then the house shall make the presentation in support of the articles of impeachment for a period of time not to exceedorn 24 hours or up to three session days. those for a period not to exceed 24 hours. each side me determine the presentations. upon the conclusion, senators may question for a period of time not to exceed 16 hours upon the conclusion that shall be four hours of argument equally divided followed by deliberation of the senate under impeachmentnt rules on the question if it is to consider and debate any motion to subpoena witnesses or documentseb. the senate without in her intervening faction if it should be in order to consider by the yays and nays under the impeachment rules following that dip is fun --dash disposition of the impeachment rules that if the senate agrees to allow the house of representatives or the president to subpoena witnesses and then they shall decide after supposition who shall testify pursuant to the impeachment rules no testimony shall be admissible in the senate unless the parties have had an opportunity to depose such witnesses. has concluded thepa senate shall vote on each article of impeachment. >> the resolution is arguable by the parties two hours equallyy divided. mister schiffer your proponent or opponent of this motion? mr. cipollone your proponent or opponent of thepr motion? then mr. cipollone you go first and you can reserve rebuttal time as you wish >> thank you, mister chief justice. majority leader mcconnell, democratic leader schumer, senators. i'm here as counsel to the president of the united states. our team is here to represent donald trump. we support this resolution. it is a fair way to proceed with this trial. it is modeled on the clinton resolution which had 100 senators supporting at the last time this body had an impeachment. it requires the house managers to stand up and make their opening statement and make their case. they have delayed bringing this impeachment to this house for 33 days, 33 days to this body and it is time to start with this trial. it is a fair process. they will have the opportunity to stand up and make their opening statement, they will get 24 hours to do that. and the president's attorneys will have a chance to respond. after that all of you will have 16 hours to ask whatever questions you have of either side. once that is finished and you have that information we will proceed to the question of witnesses in some of the more difficult questions that have come before this body. we are in favor of this. we believe once you hear those initial presentations the only conclusion will be that the president has done absolutely nothing wrong. and that these articles of impeachment do not begin to approach the standard required by the constitution they themselves will establish nothing beyond those articles, you look at those articles alone and you will determine that there is absolutely no case. so we respectfully ask you to adopt this resolution so that we may begin with this process. it is long past time to start this proceeding and we are here today to do it and we hope the house managers will agree with us and begin this proceeding today. we reserve the remainder of our time for rebuttal. >> mister chief justice, senators, counsel for the president, house managers on behalf of the house of representatives rise in opposition to leader mcconnell's resolution. let me begin by summarizing why. last week we came before you to present the articles of impeachment against the president of the united states for only the third time in our history. those articles charge president donald john trump with abuse of power and instruction of congress. the misconduct set out in those articles is the most serious ever charged against the president. the first article, abuse of power, charges the president with soliciting a foreign power to help him cheat in the next election. moreover, he sought to coerce ukraine into helping him cheat by withholding official acts, two official acts. a meeting the new president of ukraine desperately sought with donald trump at the white house, to show the world and the russians in particular that the ukrainian president had a good relationship with his most important patron, the president of the united states. even more perniciously, president trump illegally withheld $400 million in taxpayer-funded military assistance to ukraine, a nation at war with our russian adversary, to compel ukraine to help him cheat in the election. astonishingly the president's trial brief, filed yesterday, contends that even if this conduct is proved, that there's nothing the house or the senate may do about it. it is the president's apparent believe that under article 2 he can do anything he wants no matter how corrupt, outfitted in godey legal clothing and yet when the founders wrote the impeachment clause they had precisely this type of misconduct in mind, to abuse the power of his office for personal benefit, that undermines our national security, invites foreign interference in our democratic process, the trifecta of constitutional misconduct justifying impeachment. in article 2, the president discharged with other misconduct that would likewise have alarmed the founders, the full, complete and absolute obstruction of a coequal branch of government, the congress. during the course of his impeachment, this is every bit as destructive of our constitutional order as the misconduct charged in the first article. if the president can obstruct the investigation, nullify a power the constitution gives to congress, the ultimate power the constitution gives to prevent presidential misconduct, the president places himself beyond accountability, above the law, cannot be indicted, cannot be impeached, it makes him a monarch, the very evil against which our constitution and the balance of power it carefully laid out was designed to guard against. shortly these the trial of these charges will begin it you will be asked to make several determinations. did the house prove the president abused his power by seeking to coerce a foreign nation to help him cheat in the next election? did he obstructed congress in his own investigation into his misconduct by ordering his agencies and officers to cooperate, refused to cooperate in any way, to answer subpoenas for documents and through every other means? we believe the evidence will not be seriously contested, you will have to answer at least one other question. does the commission of these high crimes and misdemeanors require the conviction and removal of the president? we believe that it does and the constitution requires that it be so, or the power of impeachment must be deemed a relic or casualty to partisan times and american people left unprotected against a president who would abuse his power for the very purpose of corrupting the only other method of accountability, our elections themselves. so you will vote to find the president guilty or not guilty, to find his conduct impeachable or not impeachable. i would submit to you that these are not the most important decisions you will make. how can that be? how can any decision you will make be more important than guilt or innocence, removing the president or not removing the president? i believe the most important decision in this case is the one you will make today, the question you must answer today, will the president and the american people get a fair trial? will there be a fair trial? i submit that this is an even more important questions and how you vote on guilt or innocence because whether we have a fair trial will determine whether you have a basis to render a fair and impartial verdict. it is foundational. the structure upon which every other decision you make must rest. if you only get to see part of the evidence, if you only allow one side or the other chance to present their case, your verdict will be predetermined by the bias in the proceeding. if the defendant is not allowed to introduce evidence of his innocence it is not fair trial, so too for the prosecution. of the house cannot call witnesses or introduce documented evidence it is not a fair trial. it is not really a trial at all. americans all over the country are watching us right now and imagine their own jury duty, imagine the judge walks into the courtroom and says she has been talking to the defendant and that the defendant's request, the judges agreed not to let the const -- prosecution call any witnesses or introduce any documents. the judge and the defendant agreed the prosecutor may only read to the jury the dry transcript of the grand jury proceedings. that is it. as anyone on jury duty in this country ever heard a judge describe such a proceeding and call it a fair trial? of course not. that is not a fair trial, it is a mockery of a trial. and the constitution this proceeding, the one we're in right now, is the trial. this is not the appeal from the trial, you're not appellate court judges. one of you is. and unless the trial was going to be different from every other impeachment trial or every other kind of trial for that matter, you must allow the prosecution and defense, the house manager and the president's lawyers to call relevant witnesses. you must subpoena documents the president has blocked but which bear on his guilt or innocence. you must impartially do justice as your oath requires. what does a fair trial look like in the context of impeachment? the short answer is it looks like every other trial. first, the resolution should allow house managers to obtain documents that have been withheld. first, not last. because the documents will inform the decision about which witnesses are most important to call and when the witnesses are called the documentary evidence will be available and must be available to question them. any other order makes no sense. the resolutions allow house managers to color witnesses and the president should be allowed to do the same and any rebuttal witnesses and when the evidentiary portion of the trial ends, the parties argue the case. you deliberate and render a verdict. affairs dispute whether a particular witnesses relevant or material to the charges brought under the senate rules, the chief justice would rule on the issue of materiality. why should this trial be different than any other trial? short answer is it shouldn't but leader, let's resolution would turn the trial process on its head. 's resolution requires the house to prove its case without witnesses, without documents and only after it is done would such questions be entertained with no guarantee that any witnesses or any documents will be allowed even then. that process makes no sense. so what is the harm of waiting until the end of the trial? of kicking the can down the road on the question of documents and witnesses? besides the fact that it is completely backwards, trial first, then evidence, besides the fact the documents inform the senate on which witnesses and helping their questioning. you will have any evidence the president continues to conceal throughout most or all of the trial. and although the evidence against the president is already overwhelming, you may never know the full scope of the president's misconduct or those about him. neither will the american people. the charges here involve the sacrifice of our national security at home and abroad and a threat to the integrity of the next election. if there are additional remedial steps that need to be taken after the president's conviction, the american people must know about it. but if, as the public already jaded by experience has come to suspect, this resolution is merely the first step of an effort at -- orchestrated by the white house to rush the trial, hide the evidence, render a fast verdict, to make the president go away as quickly as possible, to cover up his misdeeds than the american people will be deprived of a fair trial and may never learn how deep the corruption of this administration goes or what other risks to our security and elections remain hidden. the harm will also endure for this body. of the senate allows the president to get away with such extensive obstruction it will affect the senate's power of subpoena and oversight just as much as the house. the senate's ability to conduct oversight will be beholden to the desires of this president and future presidents, whether he or she decides they want to cooperate with a senate investigation another impeachment inquiry and trial. our system of checks and balances will be broken. presidents will become accountable to no one. it has been reported that leader mcconnell has artie got the votes to pass this resolution. the text of which we did not see until last night and which has been changed even moments ago. they say leader mcconnell is a very good vote counter. nonetheless i hope he is wrong. and not just because i think this process, the process contemplated by this resolution is backwards and design with a result in mind and that the result is not a fair trial, i hope is wrong because whatever senators may have said or pledged or committed has been superseded by an event of constitutional dimension. you have all now sworn an oath, not to each other, not to your legislative leadership, not to the managers or even to the chief justice. you have sworn an oath to do in partial justice. that oath binds you, that oath supersedes all else. many of you in the senate and many of us in the house have made statements about the president's conduct, this trial, or this motion, or expectations, none of that matters now. that is all in the past. nothing matters now but the oath to do in partial justice. that oath requires a fair trial, fair to the president and fair to the american people. is that really possible? or as the founders feared, has factionalism or excessive partisanship made that now impossible? one way to find out what a fair trial should look like devoid of partisan consideration is to ask yourselves how would you structure the trial if you didn't know what your party was and didn't know what the party of the president was? would it make sense to have a trial first and then decide on witnesses and evidence later? would that be fair to both sides? i have to think that your answer would be no. let me be blunt. very blunt. right now, a great many, perhaps most americans do not believe there will be a fair trial. they don't believe the senate will be in partial. they believe that the result is pre-cooked, the president will be acquitted. not because he is innocent. he is not. but because the senators will vote by party and he has the votes. the votes to prevent the evidence from coming out, the votes to make sure the public never sees it. the american people want a fair trial. they want to believe their system of government is still capable of rising to the occasion. they want to believe we can rise above party and do what is best for the country but a great many americans don't believe that will happen. let's prove them wrong. let's prove them wrong. how cute you by convicting the president? no, not by conviction alone. by convicting him if the house proves its case and only if the house proves its case, but by letting the house prove its case, by letting the house call witnesses, by letting the house obtained documents, by letting the house decide how to present its own case, and not deciding it for us. in sum, by agreeing to a fair trial. now let's turn to the precise terms of the resolution, the history of impeachment trials and what fairness and impartiality require. although we have many concerns about the resolution i begin with a single biggest flaw. the resolution does not ensure that subpoenas will be issued for additional evidence, that the senate and the american people should happen the president continues to block, to fairly decide the president's guilt or innocence. moreover it guarantees subpoenas will not be issued now when they would be most valuable to the senate, the parties and the american people. according to the resolution the leader has introduced, the senate receives briefs and filings from the parties. next, lengthy presentations from the house and the president. my colleagues, the president's lawyers described this as opening statements but let's not kid ourselves, that is the trial that they contemplate. the opening statem