Noose tightens on Trump
Democrats threaten US president to resign now or face impeachment; Joe Biden refuses to endorse the move
WASHINGTON: Democrats could start the process to impeach President Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection” by his supporters who stormed the US Capitol at his instigation as soon as Monday if he doesn’t resign “immediately”.
If the move succeeds, Trump will become the first US president to be impeached twice.
Democrats are undeterred by the shortage of time available to both impeach Trump and evict him from office before he leaves the White House at the end of his term on January 20.
President-elect Joe Biden said Trump isn’t “fit for the job”, but he repeatedly refused to endorse growing Democratic calls to impeach him a second time.
“I’ve been saying for now, well, over a year, he’s not fit to serve,” Biden said. “He’s one of the most incompetent presidents in the history of the United States of America.”
But he refused to back efforts to remove Trump from the White House and insisted that impeachment was up to Congress. “If we were six months out, we should be doing everything to get him out of office. Impeaching him again, trying to evoke the 25th amendment, whatever it took,” Biden said.
Trump’s remaining 12 days in the White House seemed increasingly in jeopardy as even Republicans have joined in the growing calls for his removal from office. “I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, told The Anchorage Daily, her home state news publication in Alaska. Other Republicans such as Senator Ben Sasse
expressed willingness to consider voting for an impeachment motion, if introduced.
Congressional Democrats were moving at breakneck speed to get Trump out of office before January 20, the day when Biden will be sworn in as president.
A four-page draft of the motion of impeachment that was widely cited in US media charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection”. Trump was impeached on December 18, 2019 by the Democrat-controlled House, but his removal from office, the second and more consequential part of the punishment for a president, was voted down by the Republican-led Senate on February 5, 2020.
Pelosi calls Trump an ‘unhinged president’
In another development, Pelosi said on Friday she has spoken to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about preventing an “unhinged” Trump from ordering military actions including a possible nuclear strike in his final days and hours at the White House.
Pelosi said in a statement to colleagues that she spoke with Mark Milley “to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes” for nuclear war. She said the situation of “this unhinged president could not be more dangerous”.