As the Senate waits for the House to send it impeachment articles, McConnell said the Senate will continue its normal business and immediately moved to set up a vote on Trump's Small Business Administration nominee next week. The House could transmit the articles as soon as next week.

“We are content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate while House Democrats continue to flounder. For now,” McConnell said. “If they ever muster the courage to stand behind their slapdash work product and transmit their articles to the Senate, it will then be time for the United States Senate to fulfill our founding purpose.”

On the Senate floor in an empty Capitol on Friday, the two Senate leaders presented diametrically opposed views of how a Senate trial should go. Majority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) continued making his case for starting a trial and considering witnesses and documents later, while Minority Leader Schumer (D-N.Y.) reiterated that Democrats are unwilling to agree on a trial’s contours without a plan on whether new evidence will be introduced.

The clashing viewpoints increases the possibility that McConnell seeks to build a partisan set of impeachment rules with the votes of 51 of his 53 senators. Though Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have expressed discomfort with McConnell's trial coordination with the White House counsel, neither have endorsed Schumer's approach, either.

Schumer said he has not spoken to either moderate Republican, though he said senators are talking among themselves.

“The American people want a full and fair proceeding. The misgivings expressed by a couple of our colleagues, Sens. Murkowski and Collins, show that the McConnell wall is seeming to crack," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at a press conference back home on Friday.

Schumer continued to raise the prospect of McConnell falling short of a partisan power-play. Any Democrat can force votes on his preferred motions to subpoena new evidence and sounded hopeful that his efforts to force votes on new documents or testimony can succeed with the support of just four GOP senators.

“It may feel like we are no closer to establishing the rules for a Senate trial than when we last met. But the vital question of whether or not we have a fair trial ultimately rest with a majority of the senators in this chamber,” Schumer said.

As he left the building, McConnell declined to lay out what will happen next in the impeachment trial negotiations. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the party will discuss the matter at its full conference meeting on Tuesday.

“We’ll just have to work it out, I mean despite all the rhetoric,” said Roberts, who presided over the Senate as McConnell and Schumer traded jabs. “We could bring back [former Sens.] Phil Gramm and Ted Kennedy, but that might be a little difficult. That’s who made the decision to bring us together” in 1999, when the Senate voted 100-0 to start the trial of Bill Clinton.

Amid the two lengthy speeches, there was no indication either leader has any desire to compromise. Instead, their balky relationship was on full display, with McConnell gleefully dredging up Schumer’s 1998 campaign for his Senate seat as a vote against the removal of former President Bill Clinton.

“He voted against the articles both in the House Judiciary Committee and on the House floor. And a major part of his Senate campaign that year — listen to this — was literally promising New Yorkers in advance that he would vote to acquit President Clinton,” McConnell said with a flourish.

Schumer called McConnell’s speech a collection of “feeble talking points” that included no substantive rebuttal of his calls to hear new evidence. He said McConnell is more comfortable “finger-pointing and name-calling” than rebutting Schumer's requests to hear from acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton on why aid to Ukraine was delayed while Trump sought a Ukrainian probe into Joe Biden.

Finally, Schumer called McConnell’s idea of deciding on new evidence until after House impeachment managers and the president’s counsel deliver opening statements as a “ruse” to block the Senate from hearing any new information about the president’s decision-making.