Pelosi asks
committee to proceed with articles of impeachment against Trump
House
speaker said inquiry revealed a failure by president to uphold the law and his
actions are a ‘violation of the public trust’
Tom
McCarthy in New York
@TeeMcSee Email
Thu 5 Dec
2019 14.44 GMTLast modified on Fri 6 Dec 2019 01.50 GMT
Quoting
from the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers about the danger
of a president one day betraying the country’s trust to foreign powers, the
House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced on Thursday that she was directing the
judiciary committee to draft articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.
“The
president leaves us no choice but to act,” Pelosi said. “Sadly, but with
confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders and a heart full of
love for America, today I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of
impeachment.”
In a brief
statement delivered from the House speaker’s balcony and invoking the history
of the United States as a land free of kings, Pelosi said that the impeachment
investigation must move forward after revealing a failure by Trump to uphold
the law and defend the constitution.
“If we
allow a president to be above the law, we do so surely at the peril of our
Republic,” she said. “In America, nobody is above the law.”
About an
hour later, Trump tweeted in reply. “The Do Nothing, Radical Left Democrats
have just announced that they are going to seek to Impeach me over NOTHING,” he
wrote in part. “This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of
Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents. That is not
what our Founders had in mind. The good thing is that the Republicans have
NEVER been more united. We will win!”
Pelosi said
that Trump had engaged in misconduct on a historic scale.
“The facts
are uncontested,” Pelosi said. “The president abused his power for his own
personal political benefit at the expense of our national security by
withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in exchange for the
announcement of an investigation into his political rival.
“The
president’s actions are a profound violation of the public trust. The
president’s actions have seriously violated the constitution, especially when
he says and acts upon the belief that ‘article 2 says I can do whatever I
want’. No.”
If it has
not already begun, the judiciary committee would now draft articles of
impeachment for approval as early as next week. A vote on whether to impeach
Trump could follow on the floor of the House before a 20 December holiday
break.
Trump could
become the second president in the last 150 years and only the third of 44 US
presidents to be impeached.
In her
somber delivery and methodical quotation of the founding fathers James Madison,
George Mason and Benjamin Franklin, Pelosi hewed to a Democratic strategy of
framing the impeachment inquiry as a joyless task made imperative by the
historic dimensions of Trump’s abuse of power.
Republicans
have sought to defend Trump by attacking the process by which Democrats have
pursued impeachment and criticizing the swift pace of the inquiry, but they so
far have not managed a defense of Trump on the merits more substantive than the
president’s repeated assertion that his conduct has been “perfect”.
In recent
days Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in Congress, had been surveying her
caucus, especially moderate members from swing districts, on their views on
impeachment. Support for impeachment nationally jumped sharply after Democrats
announced their inquiry in September and then settled to 48-44% support on
average, according to FiveThirtyEight.
On
Thursday, Pelosi, who has the unilateral power to move the impeachment process
forward and to dictate its terms, indicated that Democrats in Congress had
replied to her query with vocal support for impeachment.
“In the
course of today’s events it becomes necessary for us to address, among other
grievances, the president’s failure to faithfully uphold the law,” she said.
Pelosi
spoke after the first day of public impeachment hearings in the judiciary
committee, which took up the process after more than a month of work in
chairman Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee.
Schiff
referred the investigation to the judiciary committee on Tuesday with a
300-page report laying out the committee’s finding that Trump had “abused the
power of his office for personal and political gain, at the expense of [US]
national security”.
The
judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, said on Wednesday that “never
before has a president engaged in a course of conduct that included all the
acts that most concerned the framers”.
Republicans
on the judiciary committee accused Democrats of rushing the process to impeach
Trump before voting begins in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race in
February.
Pelosi said
Congress had no choice but to act because Trump was still trying to subvert the
2020 election.
“Our
democracy is what is at stake,” she said. “The president leaves us no choice
but to act, because he is trying to corrupt once again the election for his own
benefit.”
Pelosi did
not indicate what might be the precise nature of the potential articles of
impeachment. Democrats have signalled three possible offenses: abuse of power,
obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.
If Trump
were to be impeached in the House, the proceedings would move to the senate for
a trial to be presided over by US supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts.
About 20 Republican senators would have to defect to convict Trump and remove
him from office.
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