PELOSI PRESSURES PENCE ON REMOVAL
Speaker vows House will impeach Trump unless vice president, Cabinet force president to leave
WASHINGTON
The House moved on two fronts Sunday to try to force President Donald Trump from office, escalating pressure on the vice president to strip him of power and committing to quickly begin impeachment proceedings against him for inciting a mob that violently attacked the seat of American government.
In a letter to colleagues, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said the House would move forward today with a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, and wrest the powers of the presidency. She called on Pence to respond “within 24 hours” and indicated she expected a Tuesday vote on the resolution.
Next, she said, the House would bring an impeachment case to the f loor. Though she did not specify how quickly it would move, leading Democrats have suggested they could press forward on a quick timetable, charging Trump by midweek with “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“In protecting our Constitution and our democracy, we will act with urgency, because this president represents an imminent threat to both,” she wrote. “As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this president is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”
Pelosi’s actions effectively gave Pence, who is said to be opposed to the idea, an ultimatum: use his power under the Constitution to force Trump out by declaring him unable to discharge his duties, or make him the first president in American history to be impeached twice.
More than 210 of the 222 Democrats in the House — nearly a majority — had already signed on to an impeachment resolution by Sunday afternoon, registering support for a measure that asserted
that Trump would “remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution” if he was not removed in the final 10 days of his term.
A second Republican senator, Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, said he should resign immediately, joining Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. And a Republican House member hinted more clearly than before that he could vote to impeach, even as he cautioned that it could backfire and further galvanize Trump's supporters.
With few Democrats hopeful Pence would act, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the party's No. 3, said the House could vote to impeach Trump by Wednesday, one week before Inauguration Day.
“If we are the people's house, let's do the people's work and let's vote to impeach this president,” Clyburn said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The Senate will decide later what to do with that — an impeachment.”
Clyburn argued in favor of delaying the start of any Senate trial for several months to allow President-elect Joe Biden to take office without the cloud of an impeachment drama. It would be nearly impossible to start a trial before Jan. 20, and delaying it further would allow the House to deliver a stinging indictment of the president without impeding Biden's ability to form a Cabinet and confront the spiraling coronavirus crisis.
“Let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn, an inf luential ally of Biden, said in another interview on CNN.
The uncertainty underscored how little precedent those seeking to contain the president had to guide them. No president has been impeached in the final days of his term, or with the prospect of a trial after he leaves office — and certainly not just days after lawmakers themselves were attacked.
A two-thirds majority is needed to convict and remove a president in the Senate. But if he were found guilty, a simple majority of the Senate could then bar Trump from
holding office in the future.
Biden has tried to keep a distance from the impeachment issue. He spoke privately Friday with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. But publicly he has said that the decision rests with Congress, and that he intends to remain focused on the work of taking over the White House and the government's coronavirus response.
At the White House, Trump remained out of sight for a fourth straight day and made no public comment on either the assault on the Capitol or the brewing impeachment threat. The White House announced instead that he would travel Tuesday to Alamo, Texas, to promote his border wall as part of a series of activities highlighting what he sees as the achievements of the past four years.
Other than a video message he posted Thursday night, Trump has said nothing about the attack since its conclusion and taken no responsibility for it, nor has he said anything publicly about the U.S. Capitol Police officer killed by the mob. Only after much criticism did he order f lags lowered to half-staff at the White House and other federal facilities Sunday in honor of the officer.
The four-page impeachment article that had gained overwhelming support among Democrats was narrowly tailored to Trump's role “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States.” Democrats involved in the process said they had drafted the text with input from some Republicans, though they declined to name them.
None were expected to join as a co-sponsor before it was introduced Monday, but Democrats said multiple House Republicans were privately discussing voting to impeach. When the House impeached Trump in 2019 for a pressure campaign on Ukraine to smear Biden, not a single Republican supported the charges.
“I'll vote the right way, you know, if I'm presented with that,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.