Effort gains momentum as senior House Republicans join Democrats in calling for Trump’s removal from office for role in Capitol attack
The US House of Representatives was poised on Wednesday officially to charge Donald Trump with inciting an insurrection against the US government in the wake of a deadly assault on the US Capitol , an extraordinary and historic measure that would make him the only American president ever to be impeached twice.
The unprecedented effort gained momentum overnight as senior Republican leaders in the House joined Democrats in calling for his removal from office for his role in inflaming a mob of loyalists who stormed the Capitol while members of Congress in both the House and Senate were in session to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in November’s presidential election.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the No 3 House Republican and daughter of Dick Cheney, the vice-president for the Republican former president George W Bush, said there had “never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States” than Trump’s conduct on 6 January.
A remorseless Trump called his inflammatory language at a rally immediately before the mob marched on the US Congress and breaking in last week “totally appropriate”.
He said impeachment was nothing more than a “continuation of the greatest witch-hunt in the history of politics”.
In floor speeches on Wednesday morning, opponents of impeachment objected to the rushed nature of the proceedings and argued that there was little chance the president would be removed from office before the end of his term, appealing instead for national unity.
Democrats were incensed by calls for bipartisanship, particularly from Republicans who refused to recognize Biden’s election victory and voted to overturn the results of a democratic election even after the assault on the Capitol.
“This Capitol was stormed. People died because of the big lies that were being told by this president and too many people on the other side of the aisle,” said Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat of Massachusetts, his voice rising in anger during debate on the House floor. “If this is not an impeachable offense, I don’t know what the hell is.”
The House proceeded with impeachment on Wednesday after Mike Pence formally rejected calls to strip Trump of power in an unprecedented invoking of the 25th amendment to the US constitution that allows for the removal of a sitting president if deemed unfit to perform his job.
Pence’s signal came just hours before the House passed a resolution calling on him to do so.
Trump’s day of reckoning on Capitol Hill came less than a year after he was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial for pressuring Ukraine to open investigations into Biden and his son. But with just days left of his presidency, the political landscape had shifted dramatically.
Shaken by the events of the last week, their break with Trump came only after months of tolerating and indulging his campaign of lies about a stolen election, long after it was undeniably clear he had lost.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney wrote, in a statement Democrats quoted repeatedly to make their case for impeachment. “Everything that followed was his doing.”
No House Republicans voted in support when Trump was impeached in 2019 over his attempts to persuade the leader of Ukraine to investigate the family of Joe Biden, then his election rival, now his incoming replacement in the White House.
Cheney was joined by several other House Republicans, including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who asked if the president’s actions were “not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”
The swift and historic second impeachment vote comes just one week after the riot in Washington DC – the first occupation of the US Capitol since British troops burned the building during the war of 1812 – and one week before Trump is due to leave office.
The formal charge, a single article of impeachment, was drafted as lawmakers were ducking under chairs and praying for safety during the attack.
It charges Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States’’ by encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol in a last stand to keep him in office by overturning the will of 81 million Americans who voted against him.
“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more,” he told the raucous crowd at last Wednesday morning’s gathering near the White House.
Rallying behind what they believed was a battle cry from an American president , thousands of loyalists stormed the Capitol in a violent rampage that threatened the lives of lawmakers, congressional staff, journalists and his own vice-president, who was there to fulfill his constitutional duty to count and certify the electoral college votes.
“In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government,” the article states. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed his trust as president, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
Once the House votes to impeach the president, an outcome that is all but assured as the Democrats hold the majority in the House, the Senate, which is currently dominated by the Republicans, would then hold a trial. Two-thirds of the 100-member body are required to convict a president, meaning 17 Republicans would have to join all Democrats to render Trump guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Two Senate Republicans have already called on Trump to resign, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, reportedly believes the president committed impeachable offenses.
A Senate trial is likely to unfold, at least in part, after Trump has left office.
Though the proceedings are unlikely to result in Trump’s premature removal from office, a Senate trial would not be entirely symbolic. A convicted president can be barred from ever again holding public office, a punishment that requires only a simple majority.
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