Democrats Map Trump Impeachment Path on Power Abuse, Obstruction
Trump stands accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under the Constitution: Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler.
(Bloomberg) -- House Democrats delivered two tightly crafted articles of impeachment against Donald Trump on Tuesday that urged his removal as president for abusing the power of his office and keeping Congress from exercising its duty as a check on the executive branch.
In a single nine-page resolution introduced Tuesday, the Judiciary Committee accuses Trump of having “abused the powers of the presidency by ignoring and injuring national security and other vital interests to obtain an improper personal political benefit.”
The articles, particularly the one regarding obstruction, frames the House Democrats’ action in gravest of terms: “In the history of the Republic, no President has ever ordered the 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’.”
“The evidence of the president’s misconduct is overwhelming and uncontested,” Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said at the Capitol as he, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other committee heads announced introduction of the impeachment articles. “The president’s misconduct goes to the heart of whether we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020.”
Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said his panel will prepare the articles of impeachment this week for a vote of the full House, where Democrats hold the majority, likely next week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his chamber will start Trump’s trial sometime in early to mid-January.
It would take the votes of 67 senators in the 100-member to convict Trump and remove him from office, an unlikely outcome. McConnell said he would be “totally surprised” if the Senate, where Republicans have a 53 to 47 majority, convicted the president. Only 51 senators are needed to decide on whether to hear witnesses or conduct a full trial, which would be presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts.
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said she doesn’t know yet if Trump would participate in a Senate trial.
“I’m not going to get ahead of what he may do,” Grisham said on Fox News. “But I’m sure we will participate in some way, certainly with our counsel. And we’re going to be calling on witnesses and we’ll hope they will participate.”
The narrowly drawn impeachment articles reflect the desire of Pelosi, Nadler and some other top Democrats to keep the focus of impeachment on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. That is intended to avoid a potentially protracted debate on other issues.
During hearings earlier hearings, some Democrats indicated they were exploring a bribery charge, one of the specific crimes mentioned in the Constitution. Several Democratic House members have argued that they should include material from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to show a pattern of obstruction by the president.
Mueller Report
While the articles don’t specifically mention the Mueller report, they reference it indirectly by saying the president previously invited foreign interference in elections and previously sought to undermine investigations into foreign interference.
Pelosi said the “solemn” step was necessary to fulfill the obligations of the oath of office lawmakers take “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The House impeachment inquiry, which Trump has labeled a witch hunt and Republicans derided as a rushed drive toward a predetermined conclusion, is reaching an end-of-the-year climax at the same time Congress is attempting to wrap up budget negotiations and push a major trade pact to conclusion.
The articles of impeachment were unveiled about an hour before Pelosi appeared at a news conference to announce that Democrats were ready to approve the U.S.-Mexico-Canada-Agreement on trade, a major priority for Trump. While approval would help the president fulfill a campaign promise to revamp the Nafta accord, it also allows Pelosi to demonstrate that Democrats are able to legislate at the same time they’re pursuing impeachment.
“We are at the end of the session and you have to make some decisions,” Pelosi said when asked if votes on impeachment and the trade pact were merely a coincidence.
The Senate trial will take place in January as the 2020 campaign for the White House and control of Congress gets underway in earnest.
Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale said in a statement that Democrats “are putting on this political theater because they don’t have a viable candidate for 2020 and they know it.”
Next Election
Representative Jim Jordan, a member of the Judiciary panel, said in a statement that the articles of impeachment are “the product of a baseless attempt to upend the will of the people less than 11 months before the next election.”
The weeks of testimony at public hearings conducted by Democrats haven’t budged public opinion on impeachment or on the president. Most polls show Americans evenly divided with roughly 47% to 48% supporting impeachment and 44% to 45% opposing. An overwhelming majority of people polled say their minds are made up.
In fighting back against the inquiry, Trump blocked members of his administration from testifying or providing documents sought by the House committees. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone on Friday rejected the Judiciary Committee invitation to take part in a hearing Monday, calling the impeachment inquiry “completely baseless.”
At that hearing, Nadler said he was “struck by the fact that my Republican colleagues have offered no serious scrutiny of the evidence at hand.”
But the panel’s Republican counsel, Steve Castor, reiterated one of the chief defenses of the president that’s been put forward by Trump allies: “The impeachment inquiry’s record is riddled with hearsay, presumptions and speculation.”
He accused Democrats of pursuing an “artificial and arbitrary political deadline” to overturn the 2016 election and impeach Trump before the Christmas holiday.
--With assistance from Erik Wasson and Laura Litvan.
To contact the reporters on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net;Steven T. Dennis in Washington at sdennis17@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo
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