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WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump is set to be impeached for the second time in an unprecedented vote in the House on Wednesday, a week after encouraging a crowd of loyalists to “fight like one hell ”against the election results just before they stormed the United States. Capitol in a murderous siege.
While Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 brought no Republican votes to the House, a small but significant number of leaders and lawmakers are breaking with the party to join the Democrats, claiming that Trump violated his oath to protect and defend American democracy.
The staggering collapse of Trump’s final days in power, amid alarming warnings of more violence from his supporters, leaves the country in a difficult and unknown situation ahead of Democrat Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
“If inviting a mob to insurgency against your own government isn’t an unforgivable event, then what is it?” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., writer of the impeachment article.
Trump, who would become the only two-time impeached US president, faces a single charge of “incitement to insurgency.”
The four-page impeachment resolution draws on Trump’s own inflammatory rhetoric and the lies he spread about Biden’s election victory, including at a White House rally on the day of the Jan.6 attack on Capitol Hill , to assert its arguments in favor of serious crimes and offenses as required by the Constitution.
Trump took no responsibility for the riot, suggesting that it was the will to oust him rather than his actions around the bloody riot that divided the country.
“To continue on this path, I think this causes enormous danger to our country, and it causes enormous anger,” Trump said on Tuesday, his first remarks to reporters since last week’s violence.
A Capitol police officer died of injuries sustained in the riot, and police shot and killed a woman during the siege. Three other people have died in what authorities have called medical emergencies. Lawmakers had to fight for safety and go into hiding as rioters took control of the Capitol and delayed the final step to finalize Biden’s victory by hours.
The outgoing president offered no condolences for the dead or injured, saying only: “I don’t want violence”.
At least five Republican lawmakers, including third-largest House GOP leader Liz Cheney of Wyoming, were not convinced by the president’s logic. Republicans have announced they will vote to impeach Trump, dividing the Republican leadership and the party itself.
“The President of the United States called this crowd, gathered the crowd and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said in a statement. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
Unlike a year ago, Trump faces impeachment as a weakened leader, having lost his own re-election as well as the Republican majority in the Senate.
Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is reportedly angry with Trump, and it’s unclear how an impeachment trial would play out. In the House, Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, one of Trump’s main allies, rushed to suggest lighter censorship instead, but that option fell apart.
So far, Republican representatives: John Katko of New York, a former federal prosecutor; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an Air Force veteran; Fred Upton from Michigan; and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state announced they will also join Cheney in voting for impeachment.
The House first tried to push Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to intervene, passing a resolution Tuesday evening calling on them to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Trump from office. The resolution urged Pence to “declare what is obvious to a horrified nation: that the president is unable to successfully discharge the duties and powers of office.”
Pence has made it clear he will not do so, saying in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that it is “time to unite our country as we prepare to inaugurate President-elect Joe Biden. “.
Debate over the resolution was intense after lawmakers returned Capitol Hill for the first time since siege.
Representative Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, argued that Trump has to go because, as she put it in Spanish, he is “loco” – crazy.
In opposition, Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio said that the “culture of cancellation” was simply trying to overthrow the president. He said Democrats had tried to reverse the 2016 election since Trump took office and ended his term the same way.
While Republican House leaders allow grassroots MPs to vote their conscience on impeachment, it is far from clear that there would then be the two-thirds of the vote in the equally divided Senate needed to convict and impeach. Trump. Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska over the weekend in calling on Trump to “get out as soon as possible.”
Just over a week away from Trump’s tenure, the FBI has ominously warned of possible armed protests by Trump loyalists ahead of Biden’s inauguration. Capitol Police urged lawmakers to be on alert.
With new security, lawmakers had to go through metal detectors to enter the House chamber, not far from where Capitol Police, guns, had barricaded the door against rioters. Some Republican lawmakers have complained about the screening.
Biden said it was important to ensure that “the people who have engaged in sedition and threatening life, degrading public property, do serious damage – that they are held accountable.”
Ignoring fears that an impeachment trial would bog down his early days in office, the president-elect encourages senators to split their time between making his priorities confirming his candidates and approving the COVID-19 remedy while also leading the trial.
The impeachment bill is inspired by Trump’s false claims about his electoral defeat to Biden. Judges across the country, including some appointed by Trump, have repeatedly rejected cases challenging election results, and former Attorney General William Barr, a Trump ally, said there was no no sign of widespread fraud.
Like the resolution to invoke the 25th Amendment, the impeachment bill also details Trump’s pressure on state officials in Georgia to “find” him more votes and his White House rally. to “fight like hell” by going to the Capitol.
While some have questioned the president’s impeachment so close to the end of his term, there is precedent. In 1876, during the Ulysses Grant administration, Secretary of War William Belknap was indicted by the House on the day he resigned, and the Senate called a trial months later. He was acquitted.
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Associated Press editors Alan Fram and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
This story has been corrected to show that Trump’s first indictment was in 2019, not last year.
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