Senator Hawley Video Statement on Acquittal Vote

Statement

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) released a video statement following the Senate's final vote to acquit President Donald Trump. Before the vote, Senator Hawley took to the Senate floor to voice his opposition to the articles of impeachment and to challenge the Senate to refocus on the issues important to Missouri and the rest of the country moving forward.

Transcript:
Last night I voted to bring this impeachment fiasco to an end and to acquit the President of the United States. This has been a disaster for our country. It has been a bitter, partisan process that has lasted, if we're being honest, for three years. Democrats started the impeachment process the day that Donald Trump took his hand off the Bible and was inaugurated as President of the United States.

It's just gone on for too long. They spent millions of dollars on the Mueller investigation -- it came up showing no illegal conduct, nothing done that was wrong. Now we have the same here. The impeachment articles that came over to the United States Senate didn't even allege unlawful conduct. And they didn't prove it. I can tell you.

I sat through 70 plus hours of argument. 28,000 pages of evidence were before us in the Senate, including 17 witness statements, and the testimony of witnesses before us. No evidence of any unlawful conduct by the President.

You don't take a president out of office and overturn an election just because the Democrats don't like him and who he is. That's not what impeachment was meant for. It's time to turn the page and get focused again on what the people of Missouri need.

We need to get prescription drug prices down, in this state and across the United States, and I've introduced legislation to do that.

We need to secure our border and stop the flow of illegal drugs like meth from coming into our state. Our schools, our neighborhoods, are awash in methamphetamine. Where's it coming from? Mexico. We need to secure the border and make sure that that drug flow gets stopped.

We need to expand broadband. Almost 40 percent of our state still doesn't have access to broadband. This is a huge issue in the 21st century. Kids can't even do their homework at night. They've got to go to McDonald's just to get an internet connection.

These are the kind of issues that we need to be focused on. There are the kind of issues I can tell you I'm going to be focused on in the year that's ahead.

I'm glad that impeachment is finally behind us. I hope that the Democrats leave it there and I hope that this will set a precedent that the Constitution is not to be abused for personal, political gain -- for partisan, political gain. That's what the Democrats have tried to do.

It's enough of that. Let's get focused on results. Let's get focused on the needs of the people of Missouri and the people from all over the country.

I look forward to putting my shoulder to that task in these coming months.

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