First House bid to impeach Trump fizzles, splitting Dems
WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday killed an attempt to impeach President Donald Trump for statements that the chamber condemned this week as racist, turning aside an accusation that he had brought “ridicule, disgrace and disrepute” to his office.
The move split Democrats, underscoring the divisions within the party over whether they should use their majority to charge Trump and try to remove him from office, with 95 signaling their support for at least considering the question further, and 137 moving to stop the current effort in its tracks.
The 332-95 vote to table the impeachment article drafted by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, constituted the first action by the House since Democrats took control in January on a measure to impeach Trump, a significant move that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders have toiled to avoid. By agreeing to table the article, Pelosi and the Democrats put off — at least for now — a prolonged and divisive debate over whether Trump’s conduct warrants his expulsion.
“We’ve just received an overwhelming vote against impeachment, and that’s the end of it,” Trump told reporters in Greenville, N.C., as he made his way to a reelection campaign rally. “It’s time to get back to work.”
But it was hardly the last word on the topic from Democrats torn about how to deal with the president, between progressives who want to challenge him more aggressively and moderates desperate to quash talk of impeachment and stick to a poll-tested agenda that includes improving health coverage and
raising wages for working people.
Pelosi has been caught in the middle as she tries to maintain some semblance of control over the party’s agenda while Trump increasingly dictates the terms of the debate. Those dynamics already have dominated the House’s business this week. For two days, Democrats feuded with the president over his posts on Twitter about four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color.
“You have to give him credit: He’s a great distractor,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said of Trump on Wednesday. She waved off questions about whether the Democrats’ policy priorities were being eclipsed by the president, saying, “We’re not having him set our agenda; we’re setting our own agenda.”
But in recent days, thanks to Trump’s penchant for stirring up the hottest of political controversies and simmering divisions within their own ranks, House Democrats have not seemed to be able to get out of their own way. This week has been a case in point.
Trump’s tweets prompted a rush by Democratic leaders to press a resolution condemning him. The vote on the measure took place Tuesday, and the floor debate devolved into an extraordinarily polarizing spectacle as Republicans and Democrats argued about whether it was appropriate for Pelosi to have branded the president’s tweets “racist.”
Then Green’s decision to force action on his impeachment resolution stretched the narrative into Wednesday, overshadowing marquee Democratic issues, including a vote this week to raise the minimum wage to $15 and one to repeal a tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans.
“It’s time for us to deal with his bigotry,” Green said Wednesday. “This president has demonstrated that he’s willing to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, and we have seen what can happen to people when bigotry is allowed to have a free rein. We all ought to go on record. We all ought to let the world know where we stand when we have a bigot in the White House.”
A separate vote Wednesday evening to hold in contempt Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for their refusal to comply with an investigation into the addition of a citizenship question to the census — a move the administration has since abandoned — added to the portrait of a House floor dominated by Trump and what Democrats consider his misdeeds.
“I wonder, when I watch people campaign and they talk about what they want to achieve here, how many said they wanted to have a week of contempt, of impeach and resolution all after one entity, the president of the United States?” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader. “I didn’t have anybody on either side of the aisle ever ask me that question.”
Privately, House Democratic leaders coached lawmakers to stay focused on policy achievements they could tout when they return home for a six-week summer recess beginning in 10 days. In a closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol, the chiefs of the party’s messaging arm urged lawmakers to use events in their home districts during the recess to spotlight the legislation they have passed to address health care costs, wages and corruption.
But just outside the room, reporters swarmed Green, pressing him for details about his impeachment resolution.
“Part of the feral genius of Trump is that even when he has not fully thought it through, by behaving outrageously, he demands a response,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist who was a senior White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “Pelosi tried to thread a needle by choosing the least disruptive response that would give the broadest number of people the opportunity to express themselves.”
Axelrod said the difficulty for Democrats is in striking the right balance between trumpeting their achievements while presenting a vivid alternative to Trump’s penchant for normshattering behavior.
“You need a little jujitsu to turn that against him and make people focus on the sheer opportunism of it and the bankruptcy of it — and the cost to the country of just being locked in it day after day,” he said.