Nancy Pelosi made it official: After more than two months of proceedings, the House of Representatives will move to impeach Donald Trump. “Our democracy is what is at stake,” the House Speaker said in a televised address Thursday morning. “The president leaves us no choice but to act.” Citing the Founding Fathers’ concerns of a “king president, corrupted by foreign influence,” Pelosi said Trump had abused his office and committed a “profound violation of the public trust,” and ordered articles of impeachment to be drawn up. “His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our constitution,” she said. “The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.”
The decision to move forward was all but inevitable after weeks of testimony from witnesses to Trump’s misdeeds—career diplomats largely corroborated a whistleblower report alleging that the president tried to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing investigations into Joe Biden and a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. On Wednesday, legal scholars told the House Judiciary Committee that Trump’s actions—dangling military aid and a White House meeting as incentives for Ukraine to help him politically—more than warranted his impeachment and removal. “President Trump’s conduct as described in the testimony in evidence clearly constitutes impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution,” law professor Noah Feldman told lawmakers.
What the articles of impeachment themselves will include is the next hurdle for Democrats. Moderates are reportedly lobbying against tying in Robert Mueller’s report, while others in the caucus are eager to hold Trump accountable for his laundry list of misdeeds. Then there’s the question of timing, and whether Democrats will aim to vote on the articles before the holiday break. Some have argued against rushing the process, but the president, it seems, is eager to move things into the Senate, where he’s counting on a robust defense. “If you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate,” he tweeted Thursday morning, “and so that our Country can get back to business.”
However the vote and the trial shake out, Pelosi has virtually guaranteed that Trump will become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached—something he would rather avoid. “This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents,” he warned after Pelosi’s presser. “That is not what our Founders had in mind. The good thing is that the Republicans have NEVER been more united. We will win!”
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