Trump accused Pelosi in a tweet of “looking for a Quid Pro Quo with the Senate" for refusing to send the articles of impeachment until Democrats accept the rules for a Senate trial.

“Why aren’t we Impeaching her?” Trump asked.

This isn't the first time Trump has suggested that Pelosi or other members of Congress be impeached.

The answer to Trump’s question is fairly simple: Members of Congress don’t get impeached. In fact, removing a lawmaker from office is simpler, requiring a two-thirds vote by the body in which they serve.

The Trump campaign put out a three-paragraph statement from Cissie Graham Lynch, whose grandfather, Billy Graham, founded the magazine Christianity Today.

“The impeachment proceedings brought on by the Democrats in the House have not only caused anger, but also further division among the American people,” Lynch’s statement reads. “The media bias that has been apparent for the past three years has taken a dramatic turn to be even more divisive. I was outraged when I saw that Christianity Today — a publication that my grandfather founded — used his name to support their personal political agenda.”

Lynch said she thinks Trump “has been put in this position for a time such as this.”

White House counsel Pat Cipollone and legislative affairs director Eric Ueland visited the Senate for a walk-through of the chamber, an aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed.

“We’ve been invited by the majority leader to see a little bit about how the Senate works, where locations are, and so he very graciously extended the invitation,” Ueland told CBS News reporter Alan He. “We’re happy to accept and hopefully it’ll be just a good straightforward walk through physical locations.”

Ueland is a Senate veteran, who now serves as a liaison between Congress and the White House, so the walk-through was more for Cipollone’s benefit.

Trump said Thursday that Cipollone is likely to be his lead attorney for the Senate trial. McConnell has said he’d be working closely with White House lawyers on the details of the trial.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday invited Trump to deliver the State of the Union address on Feb. 4, potentially during a Senate impeachment trial. Trump promptly accepted the invitation.

The invitation comes amid uncertainty regarding the resolution of Trump’s impeachment. The House voted to adopt two articles Wednesday, but the Senate remains at partisan loggerheads over how to conduct the trial on his removal, and Pelosi has delayed forwarding the articles for trial until at least early next month.

The delay raises the possibility that Trump could deliver the address while the trial is ongoing in the GOP-majority Senate. Feb. 4 is also the day after the Democratic caucuses in Iowa.

Pelosi, in her letter to Trump, said she extended the invitation “in the spirit of respecting our Constitution.”

“In their great wisdom, our Founders crafted a Constitution based on a system of separation of powers: three co-equal branches acting as checks on each other,” she wrote, adding that the address is meant to “ensure that balance of powers.”

At a time when Republicans are arguing that impeachment has prevented House Democrats from getting anything else done, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) released a lengthy “memo to media” on Friday, recounting “a record of results” on other matters.

The 2,484-word document devotes just one paragraph to impeachment.

“House Democrats also performed our duty under the Constitution to investigate President Trump’s abuse of power, where he sought to benefit himself at the expense of America’s national security and the safety of a key ally, and approved articles of impeachment to deter such abuse from occurring in the future,” it says.

The document begins by asserting that the year has seen “a long list of legislative successes on behalf of the American people.”

“The Democratic-led House has passed more than 400 bills,” the memo says. “Over 275 bipartisan bills remain stuck on Senator Mitch McConnell’s desk, awaiting action by the Senate, which has refused to do its job. Even while the Senate stalls, House Democrats look ahead to the new year with the same commitment and energy to tackle the challenges facing our country. We will not slow our pace.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) wants to see the documents being concealed by the White House even more than he wants to hear from the list of current and former aides who followed Trump’s order not to testify during the investigation that led to his impeachment.

Schiff recounted the texts and emails provided by Kurt Volker, the former envoy to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union.

“The few messages we did get were remarkably incriminating,” Schiff said in an interview. “So you can only imagine, if this is what the small sample of documents that we have shows, just how damning many of the other documents the administration refuses to turn over may be.”

With House Republicans predicting a backlash from impeachment will help them win back control of the chamber next year, Pelosi took to Twitter to voice a different view.

She highlighted a Washington Post analysis showing that the same number of House Republicans have announced their retirements as had done so at this point in the 2018 election cycle, which saw significant Republican losses in November.

“It means that they know they’re gonna lose,” Pelosi said of Republican lawmakers. “And if they win, they’re going to serve in the minority under a Democratic President.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) is urging his Twitter followers to press Republican senators to come on board with a Democratic request to subpoena several Trump administration officials, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who declined to participate in the House inquiry.

In a pair of tweets, Schatz pointed out that if four Republicans vote with the 47 members of the chamber’s Democratic caucus, they can implement the request at a Senate trial.

“Ask your senator if withholding foreign aid in order to get a personal political benefit is ok,” Schatz said in a tweet, referring to allegations that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine to get the country to conduct investigations that would benefit him politically. “Ask your senator if they are ok with a trial that doesn’t include witnesses from people with direct knowledge of what happened. We can get a fair trial if we get four votes.”

In another tweet, Schatz said his Twitter appeal doesn’t have “a fancy hashtag or anything.”

“I just want to reiterate that if we get four Republicans to vote with us the[n] we can get a fair trial. If not, not,” he said.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (Va.), a veteran lawmaker in the Democratic caucus, said Friday that Democrats don’t have a lot of leverage in their standoff with McConnell over the scope of a Senate trial of Trump.

Appearing on CNN, Connolly was asked how long Pelosi could wait to transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate.

“She can’t do it indefinitely because frankly we don’t have the leverage,” Connolly said. “We don’t have a lot of leverage, and we know that.”

Democrats from swing districts, in particular, “want to see this come to some kind of conclusion,” Connolly said, adding that he had heard from a lot of Democrats who don’t want impeachment to compete with their messaging on other issues in an election year.

Connolly’s views are at odds with some others in the Democratic caucus, including House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.).

Clyburn said Thursday that he would be willing to see the House hold on to the articles of impeachment indefinitely if they cannot get a guarantee that the Senate would hold a “fair and impartial” trial.

“We would be crazy to walk in there knowing he’s set up a kangaroo court,” Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said of McConnell during a CNN interview.

With the timing of his impeachment trial in limbo, Trump is scheduled to sign a $738 billion defense policy bill Friday night at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland before flying on Air Force One to Florida, where he will stay at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach over the holidays.

Trump indicated that he would sign the defense bill after striking a deal with House Democrats that permits the creation of a Space Force as the sixth branch of the military, one of his top priorities at the Pentagon, in exchange for extending 12 weeks of paid parental leave to more than 2 million federal workers, a victory for Democratic lawmakers.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump proclaimed the bill “BIG!”

“I will be signing our 738 Billion Dollar Defense Spending Bill today,” he said. “It will include 12 weeks Paid Parental Leave, gives our troops a raise, importantly creates the SPACE FORCE, SOUTHERN BORDER WALL FUNDING, repeals “Cadillac Tax” on Health Plans, raises smoking age to 21! BIG!”

Some of the provisions mentioned by Trump are actually included in a separate $1.4 trillion spending package approved by Congress this week.

The two bills that are part of that package include one focused on defense spending that incorporates border-wall funding, and the other focused on nondefense spending that incorporates the health-care tax provision and smoking-age provision.

Trump has no other public events on his Friday schedule.

Republicans have seized on a notion advanced by a law professor called by Democrats to testify during the impeachment inquiry that technically Trump would not be “impeached” if the House does not send articles of impeachment to the Senate.

“Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial,” Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman wrote in a Bloomberg column on Thursday. “Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution … If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.”

Feldman’s argument received pushback from other legal scholars, including Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

In a tweet on Thursday night, Tribe said Feldman is “making a clever but wholly mistaken point” about the possibility that Trump won’t be impeached.

“Under Art. I, Sec. 2, Clause 5, he was impeached on Dec 18, 2019. He will forever remain impeached. Period,” Tribe wrote.

After his tweet, Tribe and Feldman continued to argue over what Tribe characterized as an “academic dispute” through tweets directed at one another.

Vice President Pence sought Friday to contrast the Democratic-led House’s work on impeachment with the confirmation of federal judges in the Republican-led Senate.

“While Democrats in the House wasted all their time this week on a partisan impeachment, the Senate confirmed 13 new judges making that a total of 185 amazing judges picked by President @realDonaldTrump!” Pence tweeted.

In addition to impeaching Trump in recent days, the House also passed legislation on trade with Canada and Mexico sought by Trump, a $1.4 trillion spending package that staves off a looming shutdown and funds the federal government through September, and a $738 billion defense bill that Trump is scheduled to sign Friday night.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, said in an interview broadcast Friday that her father has been “energized” by being impeached by the Democratic-led House.

“He’s energized as are 63 million plus voters who elected him to office,” Ivanka Trump said. “This is historic … in many ways including the fact that it is the first purely partisan impeachment.”

The interview was conducted for an upcoming broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation.” A portion aired Friday on “CBS This Morning.”

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan pressed Ivanka Trump on her characterization, noting that the president sounded angry in a six-page letter sent to Pelosi in advance of his impeachment.

“I don’t think the words are mutually exclusive,” Ivanka Trump said. “You can be angry at a process that is unjust. So there can be anger, anger at the opportunity costs to the Americans we’re all here serving and what could have gotten done. Angry at the waste of time. Angry at the collateral damage. Angry, but it’s still energizing, and it focuses you and really draws into relief the stark contrasts in priorities.”

Trump pushed back Friday against an editorial in an evangelical publication calling for his removal from office, dismissing Christianity Today as “a far left magazine” that has distanced itself from the family of its founder, the late Rev. Billy Graham.

“A far left magazine, or very ‘progressive,’ as some would call it, which has been doing poorly and hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years, Christianity Today, knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call and would rather have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President,” Trump tweeted. “No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!”

The editorial, which appeared to draw so many readers that the magazine’s website crashed briefly, was written by Mark Galli, the publication’s editor in chief, who called Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”

“Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election — that is a matter of prudential judgment,” the editorial said. “That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”

Before Trump’s tweet on Friday, evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, took to Twitter to disclose that his father had voted for Trump.

“I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CTMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now,” he tweeted. “My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”

Trump continued to lash out at Democrats in a spate of tweets and retweets Thursday night and Friday morning, claiming in one that the House had engaged in “AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA” by impeaching him.

Among the things Trump highlighted were the assertion by conservative writer Mike Cernovich that Trump “is still your President and he will be your President for another 5 years” and praise of his handling of the economy from actor Pierce Brosnan.

In a tweet Thursday night, Trump asserted that Democrats were delaying a Senate trial to protect House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) from having to testify under oath and to keep several other witnesses Trump has vowed to call from having to appear. Those include former vice president Joe Biden and the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is launching an issue advocacy organization, Right Direction America, in an attempt to bolster Senate Republicans who are opposed to removing Trump from office, according to a Politico report.

The group is seeking to counter the efforts of Need to Impeach, the organization founded by liberal billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, which is targeting Republicans over impeachment.

Christie’s group plans to air television and digital ads in several states with key Senate races next year, including Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, Politico reported.

“I really think there has been a lack of attention on the positive things the administration has done for the country and a tremendous amount of attention on the negativity, particularly from groups like Tom Steyer’s impeachment group,” Christie told the publication. “And I’ve always tried to get the other part of the story out there to the people, and I was tired of sitting around and waiting for someone else to do it.”

The Trump campaign highlighted the president’s impeachment in its response to Thursday night’s Democratic debate in Los Angeles.

“After yet another drab, pessimistic Democrat debate, it’s even more clear why they felt they had to impeach President Trump. None of these characters has a chance,” Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign’s national press secretary said in a statement.

The sixth Democratic presidential debate kicked off Thursday night with the question of why more Americans don’t support impeachment and how the politicians could persuade more people to view it as the right decision.

Three of the candidates who answered would be jurors in a Senate trial.

“We have a president who is running the most corrupt administration in the modern history of this country,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “And we have a president who is a fraud because during his campaign, he told working people one thing and he ended up doing something else.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) made similar comments about corruption and Trump’s promises.

“The way I see this is we’ve now seen the impact of corruption. And that’s what’s clearly on the stage in 2020, is how we are going to run against the most corrupt president in living history,” Warren said. “We have to prosecute the case against him.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) compared Trump to President Richard Nixon but said at least Nixon let his officials testify.

“This is a global Watergate. In the case of Watergate, a paranoid president facing election looking for dirt on a political opponent did it by getting people to break in. This president did it by calling a foreign leader to look for dirt on a political opponent,” she said. “And I would make this case as we face his trial in the Senate.”