RUSH: It’s time to end this.

It’s time to shut this down and move on and make the Democrats pay a price for what they’ve done instead of letting Christine Blasey Ford come back up and make another appearance in the form of somebody else with some horrible story about Donald Trump and what he did to Marie Yovanovitch or whatever they want to try to concoct. It’s time to end this. Because this is nothing but a foundation of lies and distortions and slander and libel.

We’ve got an inspector general report that dictates and spells out the absolute corruption and abuses of power on a false, phony charge of treason, collusion with Russia. And that’s all this Ukraine thing is, is a continuation of that. None of it is legitimate. And the first chance to shut this down should be taken.

If the Republicans do it, they do not know how much they would be rewarded at the ballot box next November. They’re gonna be afraid of the media. They’re gonna be afraid of the criticism they will get. But, man, if they could pull the trigger and just dismiss this and throw it out on the basis there’s no case. The Democrats have no case. They have no evidence. There’s not a single crime even mentioned in the articles of impeachment. It would be, on a factual basis, easy to do. Politically, yeah, might be tough for some of them to pull out, but it would be the absolute greatest way to end this.

‘Cause if they don’t, if a trial actually starts, then it’s gonna be a year-long circus. Once a trial starts, the Democrats are never gonna let it end. It’s gonna become the ongoing, daily campaign event for 2020, and it will be on television every day, and it’s not gonna cost them a dime.

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RUSH: So I checked the email during the top-of-the-hour break, and there’s a couple interesting ones in there. One of them is, “Rush, I don’t get the sense from you that you’re really that worried about this impeachment business, and I think you ought to be. I think this is deadly serious, and I think they could get rid of Trump.”

All right. Look. I have over the course of these recent weeks made some predictions about what was gonna happen as these impeachment interrogatories, hearings, votes, whatever, as they took place. And look, folks, I don’t mean to be doing a Tarzan here, beating myself on the chest. Everything I’ve told you has come to pass.

The American people are rejecting it in every poll taken, support for impeachment is dropping. It’s dropping like a lead balloon among independents. It is dropping in the CNN poll even among Democrats by double digits. They simply haven’t made their case. They have not, despite all the free media they’ve gotten, all the television time, they haven’t elucidated a crime. They have not produced anything that has persuaded people that even this is a good thing to be doing.

Now, don’t misunderstand. I think this is filled with potential pitfalls and pratfalls and any number of things because it’s unpredictable, and we are not in charge of it, so we don’t know ultimately how the Republicans are gonna deal with this. And I know, I know that there are a lot of Republicans in the Senate that hate Trump. But I don’t think they’re gonna vote to remove him from office because that’s their own death warrant if they do. I’m not in any denial about the reality of all this.

I also understand that much of the hatred for Trump has nothing to do with policy. It’s all about ancillary things, his personality, his tweeting, his manner of speaking and the apparent lack of restraint, the manners, this kind of thing, all which I think is really a bunch of phony, bogus garbage. These people that are offering that kind of criticism, they’re not the paragons of virtue that they apparently think they are. In fact, that’s one of the things I find most amusing about it.

And Trump, during this period has also conducted himself in much the way I had predicted and hoped, that he would pretty much avoid day-to-day reaction. Now, Sunday I think he sent out 109 tweets. I guess he had stayed away from it for so long that he had to get back in it. But at the end of the day, this is the thing, there isn’t any evidence. There hasn’t been any evidence for any of this. And as each investigation of what’s gone on concludes, it becomes more and more obvious that there is nothing here in terms of the allegations they are making.

There are no impeachable offenses. I don’t care how this sounds to you on TV, there aren’t any. And there certainly are not any crimes. What we have are political tactics being attempted. Byron York today has a – (interruption) no, I’m gonna answer my Obama question here in just a second. Byron York has a piece today in which he expresses his theory, philosophy, prediction of some things that might happen.

Now, the headline of his piece — this in the Washington Examiner — “Impeachment Moves to Senate. Get Ready for a Scramble — and a January Surprise.” So here are some pull quotes. “Schumer is not trying to convince all 53 Senate Republicans to support his proposal. He just needs four. There are 47 Democrats in the Senate. If Schumer can persuade four GOP senators to join Democrats, they’ll have a majority of 51 and can force the calling of new witnesses. Of course, Schumer is counting on Democrats voting as a bloc against the president, which is probably a good bet.

“If Schumer gets what he wants, it seems hard to believe that will be the end of it. The request for more witnesses appears designed to lead not to closure but to reopening the case against Trump. In this way, if Democrats can introduce new testimony in the trial, they can say the new testimony has raised new questions that will require new investigation. And a new investigation will require more new witnesses, which will surely lead to more new questions,” and we get a never-ending, yearlong trial that is actually not even a trial. It is an open-faced televised investigation every day the Senate’s in session of Donald Trump.

Now, that’s what Schumer is attempting to pull off. And Byron York thinks that there might be four Republicans in the Senate that would join his request to give him 51 votes. Now, McConnell is saying, ain’t no way, dude, this is not happening, and it’s not me, it’s the Constitution. The Constitution says that the House conducts the investigation, the House presents the articles of impeachment, that is the case, that is what the Senate considers. The Senate does not investigate. The Senate does not further the investigation. It gets presented to us in its entirety, and it is on that that we will have a trial.

McConnell made it sound like he’s not moving off of that. Well, what about this 51-vote business? There are procedures that McConnell could put in place to prevent there being a vote on this. McConnell, if he wants to, could submit this case, these two articles of impeachment for dismissal on day one. Grab sound bite 8. This is Andy McCarthy speculating about this this morning on Fox.

MCCARTHY: It’s a very high expectation. I think everything at this point is to tee up what will ultimately be a motion to dismiss. I think once you get to the point of saying we can’t get rid of this, we can’t dismiss this without having a trial, then all bets are off and it becomes a very difficult proceeding to corral.

HEMMER: Let’s say the trial started on Tuesday, January 7, you bring up a motion to dismiss, you need 51 senators to vote for it, you’re suggesting if you do that, this could be over in one day?

MCCARTHY: Right. Well, one day, two days.

RUSH: Now, some people will say, “That’s too drastic. You can’t do that. That would not even be taking it seriously.” It most certainly would. These charges don’t deserve 10 minutes in the Senate when you get down to nitty-gritty. There’s nothing in them. There’s not an impeachable offense in them. By the way, this is why Schumer wants to call witnesses. He knows that Schiff hasn’t made the case. He knows that Nadler hasn’t made the case.

Schumer knows the Democrats do not have a case. That’s why he wants more witnesses. That’s why he wants this to become an ongoing investigation, not a trial. McConnell would be well within his constitutional rights as the Senate majority leader to shut this down and to dismiss it.

“Oh, man, Rush, there’d be hell to pay for that. That would make it look like Trump’s guilty and the Republicans don’t even have the guts to go through with the trial.” Screw that. This is not a legal case. This is not a court case. This is a political effort by the Democrats to nullify the election of 2016.

This is not a criminal trial. This is not McConnell refusing to accept the evidence. This would be McConnell suggesting you don’t have any, you never have had any, I’m not gonna let my Senate be used in your ongoing effort to overthrow a duly elected president. Case dismissed. And I’m telling you every Republican that supported that would be reelected in a landslide the next November.

This should have happened years ago. This should have been shut down before Mueller took the gig. It should have been shut down after Mueller reported that he found nothing. Now, shut down. I mean, you can’t stop the Democrats from doing what they’re gonna do, and you can’t stop the media from joining them and propelling them and energizing them and lying about it. But at some point the opportunity to shut this down is gonna be presented, and it’s gotta be taken.

The one thing these people up there in Washington don’t know? They don’t know the seething rage that is bubbling up every day among the people that voted in 2016, the 63 million that voted for Donald Trump. And there’s a bunch of more who didn’t, who will in 2020, and they are seething with rage over this. And nobody in Washington knows it because the media is not telling them it’s happening. And everybody in Washington only knows what’s in the mainstream media.

Now, some of them might listen to their constituencies’ letters and phone calls and all that stuff, but for the most part they’re all creatures of what they see in the paper or what they see on the news, and they don’t see… Well, actually, you know, that isn’t entirely true. Because also during this recent month process there have been occasions where the networks have gone out to battleground states, and they’ve interviewed people about this. Democrat districts, blue districts, battleground states.

They can’t find anybody supporting this. They can’t find people even to put on TV. Even stacking the deck, they can’t find people who are applauding this and encouraging more of it. They’re finding people who don’t want this to go on, who don’t think there’s anything legitimate to it. And to the extent that they’re that is seen, they are ignoring it. Everything that… (sigh) Look, folks, the potential for disaster is in everything. I’m just telling you that everything I thought would happen as the Democrats move forward is happening.

The polling support for it is plummeting. There’s no evidence. There hasn’t been any evidence for any of this since day one. Starting with the Steele dossier, there hasn’t been any evidence. There’s no foundation of anything solid that is backing up this, propping this up. This is an entire political exercise, and it’s going to have a political end — and there are people who have the power to politically end it if they will just utilize it.

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RUSH: Now, let me explain to you what all of this today is. I’m gonna boil this down to its essence. Schumer’s request for four witnesses. Some of the gibberish and the abject lying that I am hearing when I check in with the Rules Committee hearings that the House is conducting right now. It’s about one thing.

The Democrats know that they do not have a case with these two articles of impeachment, and everything they’re doing is designed to provide or create in a Senate trial a forum to present more evidence or to investigate more evidence or to have hearings and witnesses into more evidence because they know they don’t have a case.

They know that they are not anywhere near the votes necessary for a conviction and removal from office in the Senate. And they really do want that, folks. People have been saying, “No, Rush, they know they can’t do that. This is a campaign thing.” All that’s true. But folks, if they could find a way to get rid of this guy, they’d take it tomorrow. They haven’t foreclosed that.

But what all of this is about is further corrupting the constitutional process here. They want to take a Senate trial and use it to present more, quote, unquote, evidence. Remember what happened last week on the last day of the hearings when it had gone on so long that everybody was just repeating things? And finally Hakeem Jeffries let fly with his list of grievances.

(imitating Jeffries) “You really sit there and want to tell me there’s nothing wrong with a president who insults a 16-year-old climate activist? You want to tell me you have no problem with a president caught on tape talking about grabbing women in places he shouldn’t? You really want to tell me that you don’t have a problem with a president putting kids in cages?”

That’s what they want. They want a trial in the Senate where they can throw everything that offends them into supposed criminal or impeachable offense charges, because they have been seething. They can’t believe they haven’t been able to get rid of the guy. They can’t believe the Access Hollywood NBC tape didn’t get rid of him. They can’t believe that their made-up pictures of kids in cages didn’t result in the American people demanding that Trump resign, even though those pictures were from 2014 and the Obama administration.

All this talk about morality and character and how Trump violates it, all these things that irritate them, all these things that they could never get elected saying, and Trump did, oh, man, does it infuriate ’em. Bottom line, I don’t care what kind of pressure you or anybody else comes under, do not, do not fall for the idea that the Senate trial should be used for the presentation of more evidence, for the interviewing of witnesses who have not been allowed to appear heretofore.

Don’t fall for any of this, ’cause it’s nothing but a phony and corrupt effort to turn the Senate trial into a never-ending television commercial in which they would get to air every grievance they have about Donald Trump because they’re frustrated that they haven’t gotten that message out.

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RUSH: Chuck You Schumer just had another press conference basically repeating what he said at this morning’s press conference, citing some bogus Washington Post poll. (impression) “It says 70% of Republicans want the witnesses, 64% of Republicans want the witnesses! Why doesn’t the president want to clear his name? Why doesn’t the president want to present evidence that he didn’t do it?” Hey, that’s not how it works.

You guys have to present the evidence that he did, and you haven’t. You don’t have any. (interruption) Yes, it ticks me off, but you have to deal with it each and every day. Just try to nuke it best you can. The thing I realize, folks, is it doesn’t just make me mad. I know all of you who see it have the same reaction to it I do. We’re not watching this stuff in a vacuum. These people are actually digging a grave. They’re literally digging a grave for themselves, and they are not stopping. They don’t have the discipline.