House Judiciary Committee Advances Trump Impeachment Articles to the House

The House Judiciary Committee recommended the impeachment of Donald Trump in a party-line vote Friday that reflected bitter partisan disagreement over whether the ultimate constitutional punishment fits the nature of the president’s alleged misconduct.

The Judiciary Committee acted separately and without debate on each of the two counts -- one charging him with abuse of power and the other with obstruction of Congress -- approving both on identical 23-17 votes.

The votes to advance the articles of impeachment for consideration by the full House next week will inevitably lead to Trump becoming only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.

Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were impeached by the House but acquitted in their Senate trials. That is all but certain to be the outcome for Trump.

The Judiciary Committee spent two days going over the articles, including a marathon 14-hour hearing on Thursday that Chairman Jerrold Nadler abruptly recessed without a vote amid protests from Republicans. The committee reconvened at 10 a.m Friday and went straight to voting without debate.

Nadler afterward called it “a sad day” and said the House “will act expeditiously” on the articles.

As they have throughout the hearings, Republicans accused Democrats of pursuing impeachment without evidence of any crime and acting only out of anger over Trump’s election.“Democrats have sacrificed core American tenets of due process, fairness, and the presumption of innocence on the altar of a 2016 election that they lost three years ago,” Representative Doug Collins, the top Judiciary Republican, said in a statement after the vote.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Trump “looks forward to receiving in the Senate the fair treatment and due process which continues to be disgracefully denied to him by the House.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Nadler and other House Democratic leaders have cast the president’s actions in his dealings with Ukraine as leaving them no choice but impeachment to protect the nation and the election from further wrongdoing by the president.

“The institutional power of Congress to safeguard our liberties by providing a check and balance on the executive is crucial to the Constitution scheme to protect our liberties.” Nadler said Thursday night.

One of the articles accuses Trump of “corruptly soliciting” investigations in Ukraine that would aid his re-election campaign. The second alleges that no previous U.S. president “has ever ordered such complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impeded so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

Limiting the counts against to Trump to two articles was by design. Pelosi and party leaders rejected a broader set of charges that some members of the party argued should have incorporated findings from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. The leaders viewed the circumscribed approach as the straightest path to maintaining unity among Democrats.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, chairman of the House Democratic caucus and a member of the Judiciary Committee said on Thursday that Democrats have enough votes in the full House to impeach the president.

“The articles of impeachment will pass,” Jeffries said, though he said he doesn’t know how many Democrats will vote against them.

The Senate has been preparing for an impeachment trial that likely will begin in January. White House aides Eric Ueland and Pat Cipollone met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday to discuss strategy for that phase of the process, which is expected to end in the president’s acquittal.

“There’s no chance the president is going to be removed from office,” McConnell told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night.

Republicans must decide how many defense witnesses the president should present, if any. Several GOP senators said this week that there’s a growing consensus that the trial should be limited and relatively quick, moving to a vote on acquittal without hearing witnesses.

“We are having a lot of good conversations with Senate Republicans and will continue to do that through the next few days and weeks as we work through all these issues and priorities,” Ueland said.

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