Sherrod Brown on the Senate’s Role in Impeachment

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: How is the impeachment affecting the American people, impacting the American people, particularly in your state? What’s the view from there?

SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D-OH): Well, to hear President Trump talk about it, the Congress is doing nothing but impeachment, and to look at Mitch McConnell in the Senate, all we’re doing in the Senate is confirming a young, far-right, ideologically far-right judges, but the House has passed bill after bill that will affect people’s lives. Minimum age, violence against women act, net neutrality, pension bill, climate change, gun bill to address gun violence with universal background check. The House is doing all that and doing impeachment. The Senate is simply not doing anything legislatively much that would matter to people’s lives. And so, that’s really the story.

AMANPOUR: And how is that affecting? I mean, do people get it? I mean, people in your important swing state?

BROWN: Well, I think the — I mean, the president is saying all the time the Senate is not doing anything. I understand most of the coverage of the U.S. House and Senate is about impeachment, because that’s the story of the day or the week or the month or the year, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing our work every day. We did a pension hearing today. We’ve got to fix this — pensions for 60,000 Ohio mine worker and Teamster and ironworker and bakery worker retirees, and we’ve got to move forward on those things. I can’t tell the media what to cover. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. The president is going to continue to lie about all this. But we still need to do our – to get up every day and do what people hired us for.

AMANPOUR: Well, you did — and you mentioned Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader, has said that if this proceeds, the trial will come up in the New Year. You as a senator will be a juror. Have you decided how you’re going to vote or will you need to see how trial — the so-called trial in the Senate unfolds?

BROWN: Well, all 100 senators should answer that question the same way, no, we haven’t decided. I have supported — I publicly have said we should — the House should impeach this president, if I were a member the House, I’d vote for that because this president has done something that Richard Nixon never did, and that is to try to bribe a foreign official to help his campaign using taxpayer dollars and all that surrounded it. But when it comes to the Senate, there are 100 of us, we should look at the evidence. I will listen to the House managers and what they say, the prosecution, and I will listen to the president’s lawyers, the defense, and our decision should not be based on what I think about Donald Trump’s character or should not be based on any personal bias we have, it should be based entirely on the evidence. And I hope my Republican colleagues look at it the same way, because a number of them have said they are going to vote to find him not guilty, and they — people shouldn’t be answering that question that you ask with anything, but I’m going to look at the evidence and make the decision at the end of that trial in January.