Levin: The Senate should go nuclear to kill impeachment if it has to

Thursday night on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin talked about how the Republican-controlled Senate should respond if the Democrat-controlled House votes to impeach President Donald Trump.

While the Constitution itself doesn't require the Senate to take up an impeachment case, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that the Senate would have to take up an impeachment case sent over from the House due to one of the upper chamber's rules:

It's a Senate rule related to impeachment, which would take 67 votes to change. So I would have no choice but to take it up. How long you are on it is a whole different matter, but I would have no choice but to take it up based on a Senate rule on impeachment.

Levin responded that the Senate should respond to this rule as it has to others in the past: Go nuclear.

The "nuclear option," as it has become known, is when the Senate votes on a precedent to get around its own rules. It has been used in the past to lower the thresholds for the confirmation of federal and Supreme Court judges and merely requires that that a majority of senators overrule the parliamentarian's interpretation of a Senate rule. And that, the host argued, is what the chamber should do to decline to take up an impeachment case if Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Democrats are successful in impeaching the president over the whistleblower controversy.

"The Senate must not allow itself to be the plaything of Pelosi and the House Democrats, who are violating every rule" of the impeachment process, Levin said.

"And only the Senate has the power to police what House Democrats are doing. No other body. No court, not the executive branch, only the Senate," the host continued. "That's why the Senate has such a prominent role in this process."

But under these circumstances, Levin explained, the Senate must defend the Constitution, the office of the presidency, and itself from the Democrats' partisan impeachment effort, "or it will destroy its own reputation as an institution."

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