IMPEACHED
Trump forever stained after House votes to make him just third president to face removal from office
The exclusive club no one wants to join has gained another member.
A divided House of Representatives took the extraordinary step of impeaching President Trump on Wednesday, charging that he realized the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare and must be removed from office over his bid to recruit Ukraine’s government in a democracy-defying plot to steal the 2020 election.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff — who led the three-month impeachment inquiry and has become one of the most frequent targets of Trump’s ire — closed out more than eight hours of floor debate on the two articles of impeachment against Trump with a warning to his colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
“If you say the president may refuse to comply, may refuse lawful process, may coerce an ally, may cheat in an election because he’s the president of your party, you do not uphold our Constitution,” Schiff (DCalif.) said. “You do not uphold your oath of office. Well, I will tell you this: I will uphold mine. I will vote to impeach Donald Trump.”
Trump is just the third president in American history to have his record besmirched by the indelible stain of impeachment.
The House passed the first article of impeachment in a 230-197 vote that fell almost entirely along party lines. It accused Trump of abusing his power by pressing Ukraine’s president to launch investigations of his domestic political rivals while holding up $391 million in military aid and a White House meeting as leverage.
The second article — which charged Trump with obstruction of Congress over his blanket refusal to comply with the House impeachment inquiry into his shadowy Ukraine scheme — was approved in a similarly partisan 229-198 vote.
Trump, who stewed behind closed doors all day as lawmakers debated the articles on the House floor, aired his rage during a Christmas-themed evening campaign rally in Battle Creek, Mich.
“It’s my life. Very unfair to my family. I have to say this. Very unfair to my family. What they put my family through is a disgrace,” Trump said to boos from the rowdy crowd during the nearly two-hour long rally — one of the longest of his presiashamed.” dency. “They ought to be
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party in July and became the lone independent member of the House, was the only non-Democrat to vote in favor of both articles of impeachment.
“His actions reflect precisely the type of conduct the framers of the Constitution intended to remedy through the power of impeachment,” Amash said from the floor, “and it is our duty to impeach him.”
The only Democrats to vote against the first impeachment article were centrist Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a long-shot 2020 candidate, voted present on both articles, essentially passing up her chance to give a decree on the somber process to impeach the president.
Van Drew, a freshman who’s in the process of rescinding his party membership and joining the Republicans, has been voshe’s cally opposed to impeachment, saying the House is overplaying its hand since the GOP-controlled Senate likely won’t vote to convict and remove Trump from office when he’s put on trial in the upper chamber next year. Peterson has offered similar justifications and represents what’s considered the most conservative Democratic district in the country.
Van Drew and Peterson were joined by freshman Maine Democrat Rep. Jared Golden in voting “no” on the second article. Golden voted in favor of the first article but argued Trump’s alleged obstruction didn’t amount to an impeachable offense.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who long rejected calls for impeachment but changed her mind after the Ukraine scandal unfolded — gave a curious answer when asked after Trump had been impeached if going to promptly pass the articles along to the Senate.
“That would have been our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there,” Pelosi (DCalif.) said.
Progressive forces in the party have mounted an effort to push Pelosi to hold on to the articles until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agrees to call witnesses during the trial. McConnell (R-Ky.) has signaled he won’t, favoring a quick acquittal of Trump of all charges.
Throughout Wednesday’s marathon impeachment floor debate, Republicans and Democrats accused one another of being blinded by partisanship.
The Republicans claimed Democrats have run a roughshod impeachment process devoid of due process while insisting Trump did nothing wrong despite squeezing President Volodymyr Zelensky for one investigation into baseless corruption allegations against
Joe Biden and his son Hunter and another one into a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory about anti-Trump Ukrainians interfering in the 2016 election.
“This impeachment is ripping our country in half, it’s fatally flawed on the process, the substance, the intentions and the consequences … It’s a total Schiff show,” Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin said, referring to Schiff.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the top Republican in the House, chimed in, “This is raw politics and you know it.”
Schiff countered that his inquiry — based on reams of records and testimony from 17 current and former administration officials — uncovered that Trump never cared about rooting out corruption in Ukraine.
Rather, Schiff said Trump was only interested in investigations that could hurt Biden, one
of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomistill nation, as evidenced by testimony from Gordon Sondland, Trump’s handpicked European Union ambassador who admitted under oath to leading the president’s “quid pro quo” push for Ukrainian political dirt.
The push benefited Russia, as Ukraine depends on the U.S. aid Trump withheld to fight Kremlin-backed military aggression in the country’s eastern regions. The 2016 conspiracy theory that Trump wanted investigated, meanwhile, originated with President Vladimir Putin’s regime, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Most alarmingly, Schiff said, Trump’s push is still ongoing.
“The president and his men plot on, the danger persists, the risk is real, our democracy is at peril,” Schiff said, noting that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — who played a major role in Trump’s Ukraine plot — was back in Kiev earlier this month, looking for compromising information on the Bidens.
“But,” Schiff continued, “we are not without a remedy prescribed by the founders for just these circumstances: Impeachment.”
Trump now joins the ranks of Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, who were impeached — in 1998 and 1868 respectively — before being acquitted at their Senate trials. Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment, but before the full chamber could vote on them.
House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), whose committee helped lead the impeachment inquiry, said Trump’s abuses will go down as worse than any of his impeached predecessors.
“President Trump’s actions are worse than Nixon’s. Let me repeat: President Trump’s actions are even worse than
Nixon’s,” Maloney said, noting “Tricky Dick” allowed for current and former staff to testify in his impeachment inquiry.
The Trump articles of impeachment now head to the Senate, where the president is expected to face a trial in January. Two-thirds of the Republican-controlled Senate’s members need to vote to convict the president for him to be removed.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, whose panel drew up the impeachment articles last week, said Trump’s wrongdoing was part of a persistent pattern that ultimately only benefited the country that interfered in the 2016 election to help him win: Russia.
“We do not hate President Trump,” Nadler (D-N.Y.) said. “But we do know that President Trump will continue to threaten the nation’s security, democracy and constitutional system if he is allowed to remain in office.”