McConnell and Pelosi set for showdown over next steps of Trump impeachment
As Washington awoke on Thursday to the realisation that it had impeached the third US president in American history, the capital remained racked with uncertainty about what will come next in an impeachment process defined by almost total partisanship and rancor.
The two most powerful figures in the US Capitol, the Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Republican majority leader in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, almost immediately engaged in a huge showdown over who will have control over the impending congressional impeachment trial of Donald Trump over his dealings with Ukraine.
In a historic vote, the House of Representatives approved late on Wednesday two articles of impeachment against the president – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
As she tried to give the proceedings a grave, nonpartisan tone, Pelosi abruptly silenced Democrats in the House with a sharp look and gesture as they began breaking into applause after the articles passed.
Then minutes later, in a night-time press conference, Pelosi indicated that she may delay designating House ‘managers’ who officially deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate, which then triggers the trial of the president, as a way of leveraging influence with Republican leaders and cajoling them into staging a substantive trial.
Of late, senior Republicans, including McConnell, have signaled a summary trial and acquittal of Trump in the Senate.
He has said he is co-ordinating every step with the White House – the head of the jury in cahoots with the defendant – and has rebuffed Democratic demands that key witnesses including the former national security adviser John Bolton be called to testify.
“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us. Hopefully it will be fair, and when we see what that is, we’ll send our managers,” Pelosi said.
On Thursday morning, McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to say the House had done something no other Congress has ever done — impeached a president who hasn’t “committed an actual crime”. He slammed Pelosi’s threat of delaying tactics.
“House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate,” he said.
“Looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet in front of the entire country, and second guessing whether they want to do the trial.”
He added that articles of impeachment are the “thinnest and the weakest” in American history. “Nothing else comes close.”
Trump himself had a light official schedule on Thursday so characteristically took to Twitter, once again calling the impeachment process a witch hunt. He’d scoffed the night before, at a rally in Michigan as the vote went through in Washington, at the grave fate that befalls few presidents and has now, indelibly, befallen him.
Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached in 1868 and 1998, respectively, but not removed from office. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 over the Watergate scandal before the House voted on his likely impeachment.
At his annual press conference on Thursday, Russian president Vladimir Putin poured scorn on the articles of impeachment – the equivalent of congressional charges or indictments – saying they were based on “made-up reasons” and offering the opinion that Trump would almost certainly be acquitted at trial in the Senate.
In Ukraine, at the center of the impeachment battle after details emerged that Trump tried to pressure its president into investigating his political rival Joe Bidena spokesman for president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said impeachment was an “internal issue” and “Ukraine does not interfere in the internal affairs of any state”.
Back in the US, such is the vast chasm now dividing the two main parties in Congress that even some Trump opponents have begun to call for the articles of impeachment to be withheld from the Senate indefinitely. That would leave Trump in a state of limbo, with the dark cloud of impeachment hanging over his head while investigations continued.
Until Pelosi’s latest move, a Senate trial had been expected in early to mid January, just as the 2020 presidential election campaign gets into full swing with the first Democratic primaries to choose the party’s nominee due to begin in early February.
Pelosi said on Thursday morning that the reaction of Republicans: “Reminded me that our founders, when they wrote the constitution, they suspected there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.”
Trump’s line of attack, judging from an early morning tweet, was to underline and reinforce the overwhelming partisan divide. He seized on the fact that no Republican had broken ranks in the dual impeachment vote, the final tally of which was 230 to 197 on abuse of power and 229 to 198 on obstruction.
The Democrats saw two of its ranksmembers cross party lines on both impeachment votes – Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota – and a third, Jared Golden of Maine, voted against charging Trump with obstruction.
“100% Republican Vote,” Trump tweeted. “That’s what people are talking about. The Republicans are united like never before!”
In Ukraine, at the center of the impeachment battle after details emerged that Trump tried to pressure its president into investigating his political rival Joe Biden, a spokesman for president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said impeachment was an “internal issue” and “Ukraine does not interfere in the internal affairs of any state”.