Impeachment inquiry crossroads
Keep going or time to vote?
WASHINGTON >> They’ve heard enough. With stunning testimony largely complete, the House, the Senate and the president are swiftly moving on to next steps in the historic impeachment inquiry of Donald J. Trump.
“Frankly, I want a trial,” Trump declared Friday, and it looks like he’s going to get it.
Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s staff and others are compiling the panel’s findings. By early December, the Judiciary
Committee is expected to launch its own high-wire hearings to consider articles of impeachment and a formal recommendation of charges.
A vote by the full House could come by Christmas. A Senate trial would follow in 2020.
Congress’ impeachment inquiry, only the fourth in U.S. history, has stitched together what Democrats argue is a relatively
simple narrative, of the president leveraging the office for personal political gain, despite Republicans’ assertions that it’s complex, contradictory and unsupported by firsthand testimony.
House Democrats may yet call additional witnesses first, notably John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. But Senate Republicans are already looking ahead to their turn, the January trial that would follow House approval of impeachment charges.
Should they try to dispatch with such a trial in short order, which they may not have the votes to do, despite holding 53 seats in the 100-member Senate. Or should they stretch it out, disrupting the Democrats’ presidential primaries under the assumption that it helps more than hurts the GOP and Trump.
At this point it seems very unlikely the 45th president will be removed from office. And he knows it.
“The Republican Party has never been more unified,” Trump declared on Friday, calling in to the appropriately named “Fox & Friends” to talk about his achievements for nearly an hour. The Democrats haven’t got anything to impeach him on, he claimed, and if the House proceeds their work will come crashing down in the Senate.
He wants that trial, he said.
It all stems from Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president. In it, Trump asked Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor,” which involved investigating Democrat Joe Biden and a theory — debunked by U.S. intelligence — that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in America’s 2016 election. In return, Democrats say, it was made clear to Zelenskiy by others that he would get a coveted Oval Office visit. And at the same time, Trump was holding up $400 million in military aid the East European ally relies on to counter Russian aggression at its border.
For Democrats, it amounts to nothing short of a quid pro quo “bribery,” spelled out in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. They say they don’t need Bolton or anyone else to further a case they contend was well established by the White House’s rough transcript of the phone call — the transcript Trump himself implores America to read.
“We Democrats are tired of a president who is willing to put his own personal interests above the Constitution,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, DWash., a Judiciary Committee member. “I don’t think we should be waiting.”