Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s speech in Senate Trump impeachment trial (Feb 3, 2020)

On February 3, 2020, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee delivered her statement on the Senate floor ahead of the vote on President Trump’s first impeachment trial. Blackburn argued that House Democrats had rushed the process, manipulated the proceedings, and attempted to pre-litigate the 2020 election by removing Trump from the ballot. She called on her colleagues to acquit the president and reject both articles of impeachment.

The Impeachment Was Divorced from Reality

Blackburn opened her remarks by arguing that the gravity of the proceedings had been undermined by the House managers’ approach. “The impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump was a moment in history that should have been shrouded in the gravity of its potential consequences. Instead, day by day, we endured hyperbole in its most unserious form,” she said.

She drew a sharp distinction between Washington and the rest of the country: “It’s easy to forget that America’s appetite for scandal fades quickly once you exit the Beltway around Washington, D.C. But I encourage my colleagues to recognize that the enthusiasm with which the House managers have sought President Trump’s removal is completely and inarguably divorced from reality in the heartland.”

Blackburn told her fellow senators that her constituents in Tennessee viewed the proceedings as a thinly veiled political operation. “As it appeared to my fellow Tennesseans, the intentional mishandling of the House of Representatives’ constitutional duty was nothing more than an attempt to pre-litigate the 2020 election. To pre-litigate the 2020 election and to remove President Trump from office and thereby remove him from the ballot.”

Criticizing the House Process

Blackburn laid out several specific complaints about how the House had conducted its impeachment inquiry. She accused Democrats of freezing out the president’s legal counsel and denying them “an opportunity to fairly participate in the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.”

She took aim at House Manager Adam Schiff directly, accusing him of fabricating dialogue. “House Manager Schiff created the supposed conversations he falsely attributed to the President and waited to see if his assertions would be questioned or if they were going to be accepted as facts,” Blackburn said. She then added a personal touch: “I’m a mom and I’m a grandmother. And I will tell you this. I don’t think there is any mother on earth who would stand for it if her child did such a thing to a coach or a teacher or a scout leader or a minister.”

The Whistleblower Question

Blackburn pressed on the unresolved questions surrounding the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry. “House managers relied heavily on the assertions of a whistleblower but refused to reveal anything about the circumstances that led to the whistleblower’s report,” she argued.

She posed a series of unanswered questions: “Do we know if the whistleblower is a person or if it’s a group of people? Does the report represent a consensus of ideas or just biased opinion? Was it prepared by an individual or prepared by a committee?” Blackburn answered her own questions: “No one can answer that question except House Manager Schiff and his staff from the House Intel Committee. But that’s not something they wanted to come down and talk about.”

The Subpoena Strategy

Blackburn argued that House Democrats had made a calculated decision to abandon their own subpoenas rather than fight for the evidence they claimed was essential. “When it became clear that the White House would push back on witness subpoenas seeking testimony protected by executive privilege, House Democrats chose to move on rather than fight as hard as they could for their case,” she said.

She characterized the subsequent demands for the Senate to call witnesses as an attempt to get a “do-over” for the House’s own failures. “Instead, they tried to rely on the pandemonium created by a historic moment to convince their colleagues and the American people that justice demanded a do-over. When that strategy failed, they blamed the members of the U.S. Senate for our unwillingness to go in and clean up their mess.”

Blackburn called the witness demands “a manipulation tactic aimed right at the hearts of the American people” and argued that voters could see through it: “Unfortunately for the House managers, the people see with dazzling clarity what has transpired within the four walls of this chamber.”

Blackburn’s Case for Acquittal

Blackburn told her colleagues she had done her “constitutional due diligence” by reading the House managers’ brief, the reports from House Republicans, and the president’s counsel’s filings. “I saw it all in black and white, and it was my due diligence that has led me to support acquittal,” she said.

She drew on her own experience in the House of Representatives to argue that impeachment was not the appropriate response to policy disagreements. Blackburn recalled that when she served in the House under Presidents Bush and Obama, she and her colleagues had discussed impeachment in response to issues like “President Obama’s apology tour, his senseless pursuit of government-run health care, and his involvement in the fast and furious scandal or the DACA Executive Memo.”

But she said they chose a different path: “We litigated our policy differences in the courts where those battles belong.”

Blackburn closed with a direct appeal: “I implore every member of this body to recognize the supremacy of the Constitution over partisan spin, vote to acquit, vote to reject the two Articles of Impeachment.”

Key Takeaways

Sen. Blackburn argued the impeachment proceedings were “completely and inarguably divorced from reality in the heartland” and that her Tennessee constituents viewed the effort as an attempt to pre-litigate the 2020 election by removing Trump from the ballot.
She criticized House Democrats for freezing out the president’s counsel, abandoning their own subpoenas rather than litigating them in court, and then demanding the Senate call witnesses to “clean up their mess.”
Blackburn called for acquittal based on her own due diligence review, drawing on her House experience to argue that policy disagreements should be resolved in courts rather than through impeachment proceedings.

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