Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was right to so eloquently smack down cryin’ Chuck Schumer’s request for a “Schumer do-over” of the House impeachment process with unheard-from witnesses. If, as House Democrats insist, the “evidence” is “uncontested,” why does Schumer seek new evidence and want to hear new witnesses, providing a list of White House advisers but not a list that includes the alleged Ukraine whistleblower?

Schumer whines that McConnell has said he will take his cues on a Senate trial from President Trump, whom the House denied due process and the right to confront his accuser. Too bad, cryin’ Chuck, for just as in the House, elections have consequences. Republicans won the Senate so you play by their rules   

Schumer pretends that a Senate impeachment trial is like a trial in criminal or civil court and that McConnell can’t act as both a juror and a defense attorney. Of course he can -- an impeachment trial is more of a political process than a judicial one. Schumer is trying to depose a sitting President of the United States and overturn the results of an election, disenfranchising 63 million voters, without a crime or evidence of a crime, and he wants to talk about fairness?

McConnell is no more “tainted” as a juror for working with President Trump than the Senate Democrats, also jurors, who ran and are still running against Trump in 2020 -- Kobuchar, Harris, Warren, Booker, Sanders. They had or have a vested interest in Trump’s removal that in a regular trial would constitute a disqualifying conflict of interest. They would personally benefit from Trump’s removal so should they recuse themselves as some have asked McConnell to do?

Tainted Senate jurors? How about Democrat Senators Durbin, Menendez, and Leahy, who begged Ukraine officials to give them some dirt on Donald Trump and to help with the Mueller investigation:

Democrats wrote to the Ukrainian government in May 2018 urging it to continue investigations into President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign -- collusion later found not to exist..

The demand, which came from U.S. Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), resurfaced Wednesday in an opinion piece written by conservative Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post:

It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”

So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate?

These guys are going to be impartial jurors in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump when they demanded Ukraine dig up dirt on President Trump. Weren’t they abusing the powers of their office for personal political gain?

Tainted Senate jurors? What about those who took campaign cash from Ukrainian sources?

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” -- a group of Democratic Senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry's former chief of staff.

That's handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine's energy sector, directly in line with Burisma's interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, "We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets."

This was at a time when Democrats were waging a war on fossil fuels, opposing fracking, and trying to shut down U.S. energy production. American natural gas was bad for the environment but Ukrainian natural gas was good for the campaign coffers when it involves Hunter Biden’s business interests and John Kerry’s former chief of staff. As Hilton points out, Sen. Markey’s hypocrisy runs particularly deep:

Sen. Ed Markey was the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal! He wants to shut down gas production in America. Yet he personally intervened with the Obama administration to send your tax dollars to boost Ukraine's gas production. And not just once.

Not only did he write that letter to Obama, but he sponsored multiple pieces of legislation that called for more U.S. assistance and aid specifically to help Ukraine's natural gas sector, including one that "directs the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to prioritize support for investments to increase energy efficiency, developed domestic oil and natural gas reserves and develop renewable energy sources in Ukraine."

Hilton also documented the link between Ukraine lobbyist David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff, and Sen, Richard Blumenthal, the faux Vietnam vet from Connecticut who so self-righteously sat in judgment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings: He was a significant recipient of Ukraine campaign cash:

Steve Hilton, a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."…

Markey, Hilton says, “was the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal! He wants to shut down gas production in America. Yet he personally intervened with the Obama administration to send your tax dollars to boost Ukraine's gas production. And not just once.” Archer, Hunter Biden's crony, funneled Burisma money to Richard Blumenthal “three times in 2013. The next year, Blumenthal returned the favor by backing legislation that would directly benefit Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

This reeks of Democrat hypocrisy and corruption among members of the Senate jury pool, Sen. Schumer. How about calling your tainted Democratic Senators as witnesses to explain their own conflicts of interest and corruption? Stop lecturing Mitch McConnell on propriety and clean up your own horse stalls. 

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.