The Senate tasked with holding President Trump’s impeachment trial would be unrecognizable to most of its predecessors.
It’s particularly true for those who ran the last trial 21 years ago, a GOP-led Senate that logged almost 1,200 hours in session. By the end of 1999, senators had cast more than 350 votes on legislation and ushered into existence 170 laws, signed by a president after they tried and failed to evict him from office. It took more than 15,000 pages to cover that year’s Senate work in the Congressional Record.
The current Senate logged almost 230 fewer hours of floor time in 2019, voting just 108 times on actual legislation. And through the first 11 months of last year, the Senate’s official footprint covered just 6,779 pages in the Congressional Record. Continue reading.