Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Have power and words have consequences.

Alright Joe, so we've had a lot going on with the impeachment trial in recent days.

So let's try to break down and summarize the impeachment trial and all that's happened so far.

Last week began with a bit of drama.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had originally wanted the 24 hours for each side

to present their case to be done over two days for each side.

So 12 hours per day.

In addition, he didn't want the House record to be admitted into evidence in the Senate at that point.

But shortly after the trial began and words started to leak that McConnell didn't have the votes, he changed the terms.

So walk us through what happened and why it's important.

Well, the rules that get codified in the Senate resolution dictate how the trial works.

When a criminal trial or even a civil trial and Katie, you know, this better than me, there's pre-trial motions.

And you know, the rules of the road get fixed and then both sides know what they're allowed to do and more importantly what they're not allowed to do.

In this case, for McConnell, what he wanted to project was that his caucus was together.

He wanted to balance what the moderates and his caucus needed with giving as little as he could to the Democrats and the House managers and making this as short and sweet as it could be for the president.

And he misjudged that and he misjudged it by balancing too much on the side of what the president wanted and not what his caucus wanted.

And when the resolution circulated the night before the trial, which in and of itself is a ridiculous thing that no one knew what the rules were the night before his caucus revolted up to 15 senators.

So they're not just moderates guys like Tom Cotton, who, you know, he probably carries a gun in which shoot you if you called him a moderate said that it was too draconian.

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