House sets impeachment vote to charge Trump with incitement
Poised to impeach, the House sped ahead Monday with plans to oust President Donald Trump from office, warning he is a threat to democracy and pushing the vice president and Cabinet to act first in an extraordinary effort to remove Trump in the final days of his presidency.
House Democrats introduced an article of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Monday for his role in inflaming a mob that attacked the Capitol, scheduling a Wednesday vote to charge the president with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” if Vice President Mike Pence refused to strip him of power first.
Moving with exceptional speed, top House leaders began summoning lawmakers still stunned by the attack back to Washington, promising the protection of National Guard troops and Federal Air Marshal escorts after last week’s stunning secu
rity failure. Their return set up a high-stakes 24hour standoff between two branches of government.
As the impeachment drive proceeded, as federal law enforcement authorities accelerated efforts to fortify the Capitol before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Authorities announced plans to deploy up to 15,000 National Guard troops and set up a
multilayered buffer zone with checkpoints around the building by Wednesday, just as lawmakers are to debate and vote on impeaching Trump.
Federal authorities also said they were bracing for a wave of armed protests in all 50 state capitals and Washington in the days leading up to the inauguration. “I’m not afraid of taking the oath outside,” Biden said Monday, referring to a swearingin scheduled to take place on a platform on Capitol’s west side, in the spot where rioters marauded last week.
Biden signaled more clearly than before that he would not stand in the way of the impeachment proceeding, telling reporters in Newark, Delaware, that his primary focus was trying to minimize the effect an allconsuming trial in the Senate might have on his first days in office. He said he had consulted with lawmakers about the possibility they could “bifurcate” the proceedings in the Senate, such that half of each day would be spent on the trial and half on the confirmation of his Cabinet and other nominees.
In the House, a vote was
scheduled for Tuesday evening to first formally call on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. Republicans had objected Monday to unanimously passing the resolution, which asked the vice president to declare “president Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting president.”
The House is slated to begin debate on the impeachment resolution Wednesday morning, marching toward a vote late in the day unless Pence intervenes beforehand.
“The president’s threat to America is urgent, and so too will be our action,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said, outlining a timetable that will most likely leave Trump impeached one week to the day after he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol as lawmakers met to formalize Biden’s victory.
The vice president had already indicated that he was unlikely to act to force the president aside, and no one in either party expected Trump to step down. With that in mind, Democrats had already begun preparing a lengthier impeachment report documenting the president’s actions and the destruction that followed to accompany their
charge. They were confident they had the votes to make Trump the first president ever to be impeached twice.
The impeachment article invoked the 14th Amendment, the post-Civil War era addition to the Constitution that prohibits anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding future office. Lawmakers also cited specific language from Trump’s speech last Wednesday riling up the crowd, quoting him saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The Republican Party was fracturing over the coming debate, as some agreed with Democrats that Trump should be removed and many others were standing behind the president and his legions of loyal voters. They were also fighting among themselves, with many Republicans furious over what took place a week ago and blaming their own colleagues and leaders for having contributed to the combustible atmosphere that allowed a pro-Trump rally to morph into a deadly siege.
Unlike Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019, few Republicans were willing to muster a defense of Trump’s actions, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, pri
vately told his conference that the president deserved some blame for the violence, according to two people familiar with his remarks. McCarthy remained personally opposed to impeachment and tried to hold his conference together during a call Monday.
But as many as a dozen Republicans were said to be considering joining Democrats to impeach, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican. “It’s something we’re strongly considering at this point,” said Rep. Peter Meijer, a freshman Republican from Michigan, told a Fox affiliate in his home state. “I think what we saw on Wednesday left the president unfit for office.”
If Trump is impeached by the House, which now seems virtually certain, he would then face trial in the Senate, which requires all senators be in the chamber while the charges are being considered. Democrats had briefly considered trying to delay an impeachment trial until the spring, to buy Biden more time without the cloud of such a proceeding hanging over the start of his presidency, but by late Monday, most felt they could not justify such a swift impeachment and then justify a delay. Still, the timing of a trial remained unclear because the Senate was not currently in session. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat, was considering trying to use emergency procedures to force the chamber back before Jan. 20, a senior Democratic aide said, but doing so would take the consent of his Republican counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
The four-page impeachment article charges Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” when he sowed false claims about election fraud and encouraged his supporters at a rally outside the White House to take extraordinary measures to stop the counting of electoral votes underway at the Capitol. A short time later, rioters mobbed the building, ransacking the seat of American government.
“In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government,” the article read. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed his trust as president, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”