Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) praised the House impeachment mangers for a focused and organized presentation on the first day of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial while blasting the Trump team for their random arguments and appearing at times to be “embarrassed of their arguments”.
“I said I’d be an impartial juror. Anyone listening to those arguments, the House managers were focused. They were organized. They relied upon both precedent, the constitution and legal scholars. They made a compelling reason. President Trump’s team were disorganized,” he said, according to the Hill.
“They did everything they could but to talk about the question at hand. And when they talked about it, they kind of glided over it, almost as if they were embarrassed of their arguments. Now I’m an impartial juror, and one side is doing a great job. And the other side is doing a terrible job on the issue at hand. As an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job,” Cassidy added.
Asked if Trump’s team did a bad job the Louisiana senator said: “It speaks for itself. It was disorganized, random, had nothing—they talked about many things but they didn’t talk about the issue at hand.”
Cassidy voted with all fifty Democrats and five of his Republican colleagues—Sens. Romney, Murkowski, Collins, Sasse and Toomey– to say impeaching a president who is already out of office is constitutional.
He previously supported a motion by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul last month to declare the trial unconstitutional.
Cassidy stressed that this vote on Tuesday meant nothing about whether or not he would vote to convict Trump on the article of impeachment passed by a bipartisan majority in the House last month.
