I address this not just to wavering Republicans, but also to any Democratic Senators who might to be open to putting the good of the nation above partisan considerations. When I was Governor of Arkansas, I worked across the aisle with a heavily Democratic legislature, so I know what it means to put politics aside and work for the common good.

You are now faced with one of those times. And this is the spirit in which I am writing to you to urge you not to give in to pressure to allow more witnesses, subpoenas and document requests. Yes, I am a Trump supporter, but this has nothing to do with protecting a particular President. This is about protecting future Presidents, Congresses, the Constitution and the future of America itself.

Fundamentally Undermining Our Government

What the House impeachment managers are asking you to do will fundamentally undermine our government from this point forward if you give in to pressure and allow it. It is the duty of the House under the Constitution to investigate and vote on whether the case has been made for impeachment. Impeachment means legislators overturning the will of the voters, so it must never be taken lightly. It’s a drastic, last resort action that must only be undertaken in the face of genuinely “overwhelming” evidence of actual impeachable crimes, not policy differences. As Speaker Pelosi herself said not long ago, impeachment “is so divisive to the country” that it should not be pursued “unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.”

The case before you represents none of those things. Having failed to make a compelling, overwhelming and bipartisan case for impeachment, despite the advantages of running an investigation that denied the President basic due process rights, the House managers are now begging you to finish their job for them. They want you to tie up the Senate and ignore the people’s business for an indeterminate amount of time so that they (and you) can go on a scavenger hunt for evidence and documents they either failed to find or didn’t bother to follow the legal process of obtaining.

If you give in to this demand, you will forever change the meaning of impeachment and the role of the Senate. The House has already done incalculable damage to our system by setting precedents of impeachment being launched without a full House vote, hearings being partisan and held in secret, the President being denied due process, testimony being hidden from the other Party, and articles of impeachment being passed on vague grounds with no evidence or citation of any “high crimes or misdemeanors.”

All this has lowered the bar for impeachment, cheapening it into a partisan political weapon that can be wielded whenever opposing parties are in power in the White House and Congress.

Like Children Crying For You to Do Their Homework

Now, they are asking you to forever cheapen the role of the Senate, from wise and impartial jurors to partisan assistant prosecutors. They expect you to finish the job they failed to do, no matter how much of your time that wastes. At the beginning of this nation, the Senate was created as a place where bad ideas that were passed in the heat of passion in the House would be stopped by cooler heads. This is a sterling example of such an occasion.

I know most of you are parents. If your children threw a tantrum and tried to pressure and guilt you into doing their homework for them, you would say no. Because then they’d just keep doing it over and over, expecting you to do their work forever, and never learn to take responsibility. You saw how the call to expand the Kavanaugh hearings allowed what should have been a serious confirmation procedure to devolve into a divisive, chaotic partisan circus. Imagine that 24/7 under every President elected from now on. Fortunately, the majority of Senators saw what was happening to Justice Kavanaugh and had the courage to stand up to intense pressure and end it.

Whether or not you suspect, or even believe, that President Trump might have done something wrong or that rises to the level of impeachment, the White House team has demonstrated unequivocally that the House managers have failed to make that case. Moreover, they’ve engaged in misleading testimony to try to convince you otherwise. Also, just by claiming they need more witnesses and documents that they could have obtained themselves, the House managers are admitting they failed to do their job of proving their case.

Don’t curse yourself to having these errant, lazy children showing up on your doorstep over and over to the end of eternity, demanding that the Senate do their work for them. Don’t let them exploit your understandable impulses toward “fairness” and hearing more information to bilk you into doing their job, and in the process, forever undermining the Constitution and altering the role of the Senate.

As Prof. Alan Dershowitz pointed out, the House is doing just what the Founders were afraid might happen at some point down the road. We’re now at a fork in that road. It’s time to take that fork and stick it in this case, because it’s done.

URGENT: Co-sign my letter to the U.S. Senate. Help me reach a goal of 100,000 signatures by noon tomorrow. We are running out of time.

https://www.mikehuckabee.com/open-letter-to-the-u-s-senate?=3

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.