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Washington – U.S. Representative John Katko said today he would vote to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting a riot last week on the U.S. Capitol.
Katko, R-Camillus, is the first House Republican to recognize that he will join at least 218 House Democrats who have signed an impeachment resolution. A vote is expected Wednesday, a week before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
Katko said he felt compelled to live up to his oath and defend the Constitution by impeaching Trump.
“Allowing the President of the United States to incite this harmless attack is a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” Katko said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot stand idly by. I will vote to remove this president.
Representative Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, is the only other GOP House member to have indicated he would support an effort to remove Trump from office. But he didn’t specifically say he would vote for impeachment.
Republican Liz Cheney, third House Republican, told GOP members on a conference call Monday that their impeachment decision was a “vote of conscience” and not a political vote, the Associated Press reported.
No other House Republican in New York State has said they will break away from the GOP to impeach Trump for “incitement to insurgency.”
Katko said that as a former federal prosecutor he approached the issue of impeachment by reviewing the facts about what happened last week.
“It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurgency – both on social media before January 6 and in his speech that day,” Katko said. “By deliberately promoting baseless theories that suggest the election was somehow stolen, the President has created a fuel environment of disinformation, disenfranchisement and division. When this manifested itself in acts of violence on January 6, he refused to quickly and forcefully cancel it, putting countless lives at risk.
Katko was among hundreds of members of Congress locked in the Capitol for hours on Wednesday, waiting for rioters to be kicked out of the building and Trump to call his supporters.
The House impeachment resolution seeks to remove Trump from the presidency and prevent him from once again holding federal electoral office.
Katko, who co-chairs Tuesday’s group’s moderate Republicans caucus, is expected to be among less than a dozen House Republicans to break ranks in Wednesday’s vote.
Representative Tom Reed, R-Corning, said today that he would support a bill to censor Trump and an effort to ban him from federal office in the future. But Reed said the impeachment was too big a step, and could “further fuel the flames of division” without accomplishing anything.
For Katko, his decision to support impeachment ends a quick reversal of his support for Trump since the attack on Capitol Hill.
Katko endorsed Trump in the 2020 presidential election. He joined a unanimous House Republican conference in a vote against the president’s impeachment in December 2019.
After an angry mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol last week, Katko said the president lost his support. The violence left a Capitol policeman and four rioters dead.
“If I had known at the time what I saw yesterday, I clearly would not have supported it, and I cannot support it in the future,” Katko said Thursday when asked about Trump. “The recoil is 20 to 20.”
Even before the attack on the Capitol, Katko had rebuked the president for making baseless allegations of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Katko refused to join the majority of the GOP House which opposed on Wednesday certification of the electoral college vote for Biden.
Trump, in comments to reporters today, criticized efforts to impeach him a second time in 13 months.
Trump said the impeachment resolution was “the continuation of the greatest witch hunt in political history.” He called for “no violence” but said “this impeachment causes enormous anger”.
Ahead of voting on the impeachment resolution on Wednesday, House Democrats plan to vote tonight on a measure that officially calls on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and strip Trump of office.
Katko said he plans to vote against the resolution tonight.
“Vice President Pence has made it clear that he will not do this, and believes that elected officials should be responsible for this effort, not the acting and remaining members of the cabinet,” Katko said. “Accordingly, I will not support this effort.”
Any Senate impeachment trial would likely not begin until Jan. 19, when Senators are due to return to Washington, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY., Democratic leader, has said he may try to use emergency powers to speed up the start of the trial.
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