The House of Representatives on Wednesday evening made history as they voted to impeach President Donald Trump, accusing him of abusing the power of the presidency to benefit himself politically and then obstructing Congress as it investigated his actions. This makes Trump the third president in history to have been impeached.
Edited by: TJVNews.com
NBC News reported that Trump was impeached on two articles. The first vote, 230-197, was to impeach him for abuse of power and was almost entirely on party lines; it was followed quickly by a second 229-198 vote that the president obstructed Congress. One Democrat, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is running for president, voted “present” on both articles.
The trial in the GOP-controlled Senate on whether to remove the president will begin in early January. It is likely that Trump will be acquitted since a two-thirds majority is required for conviction and removal from office.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened hours of debate, telling lawmakers that Trump, by pressing Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden, and then standing in the way of a congressional investigation, “gave us no choice” but to pursue his impeachment.
“If we do not act,” she said, “we would be derelict in our duty. Today we are here to defend democracy.”
Republican Congressman Doug Collins, one of Trump’s staunchest supporters, dismissed Pelosi’s assessment of Trump, contending Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump since he was elected three years ago. Now, Collins said, rather than the House impeaching Trump less than a year before he seeks re-election in 2020, it should be “a matter for the voters” to decide his fate.
“The president did nothing wrong,” Collins said, in pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to open the Biden investigation at the same time Trump was withholding $391 million in military aid Kyiv wanted to help pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The Georgia congressman rejected Democratic claims that Trump engaged in a reciprocal quid pro quo — blocking the military assistance until he got the Biden investigation — because “nothing was ever done to get the money,” with Trump dispatching the aid in September without Zelenskiy launching a Biden probe.
The House planned six hours of debate before voting on the two articles of impeachment. One Democratic lawmaker after another stated the case for impeachment alternated with Republicans decrying the allegations as unfounded and unwarranted, the product of an unfair and rushed investigation led by the House’s Democratic majority.
Trump now faces a trial in the Republican-majority Senate next month, although his conviction and removal from office remains highly unlikely. The trial occurs 10 months before Trump is running for re-election to a second term in next November’s national election.
Trump, hours after he sent a scathing six-page letter to Pelosi deriding Democrats’ impeachment effort against him, he took to Twitter early Wednesday to continue to attack his political opponents.
“Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG!” he said. “A terrible Thing. Read the Transcripts. This should never happen to another President again. Say a PRAYER!”
Trump said that despite the Democrats’ patriotic talk, they were actually perpetrating “an assault on America.”
Pelosi invoked the Pledge of Allegiance and the Preamble to the Constitution in arguing that the Founders’ vision for a republic was threatened by the actions by Trump in the White House.
“Today we are here to defend democracy for the people,” she said to applause from Democrats in the chamber. “I solemnly and sadly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States.”
The impeachment votes happened at the same time that Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in the midwestern state of Michigan, one of the pivotal states he won in the 2016 election that made him the 45th U.S. president.
In Battle Creek, where the Kellogg Cereal company was located, Trump told the cheering crowd, “It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “The country is doing better than ever before. We did nothing wrong. And we have tremendous support in the Republican party like we have never had before. Nobody has ever had this kind of support.”
There were several dissenters, however, who chose not to tow the Democratic party line. Two Democrats, Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota, voted with Republicans against both articles of impeachment, while another Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted yes on abuse of power and no on obstruction of Congress, as was reported by NBC.
In one article of impeachment, Democrats leading the charge against Trump accuse him of abusing the presidency by orchestrating a months-long effort to get Zelenskiy to investigate Biden, his son Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company and a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to undermine Trump’s candidacy, with the military aid hanging in the balance at the same time.
The second accusation alleges that Trump obstructed Congress by refusing to turn over thousands of pages of Ukraine-related documents to impeachment investigators and blocking key aides from testifying at weeks of inquiries Democrat-controlled House committees conducted about Trump’s actions. (VOA News)
