Trump would be “impeached for life: US House
WASHINGTON : The US House of Representatives last night voted to send two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate for trial.
Sending the president and his party into uncharted territory in a deeply divisive trial fraught with history and political risk.
Lawmakers split largely along party lines, 228 to 193, in a vote that will allow a historic Senate impeachment trial of Trump to begin in the coming days.
“We are here today to cross a very important threshold in American history,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as she spoke on the House floor before a vote to transmit the articles. Regardless of the outcome, she added, Mr. Trump would be “impeached for life.”
Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has been named as the lead manager.
The House will vote to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. After the vote, lawmakers who will act as prosecutors will walk the articles of impeachment to the Senate side of the Capitol.
The White House immediately slammed Pelosi and the Democratic Party.
In a choreographed ritual, the House formally appointed seven Democrats to serve as impeachment managers prosecuting the case before the Republican-controlled Senate. The group silently marched two charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, encased in slim blue folders, across the Capitol to set in motion the third presidential impeachment trial in American history.
The proceedings commencing on Thursday will play out in a Capitol already rived by politics during a contentious election year. Among the senators who will be sitting in judgment of Mr. Trump will be four Democrats who are running for president, juggling their campaigns to defeat him with their duties as jurors.
The trial is laden with peril for Mr. Trump. He will face weeks of public discussion of the allegations that he solicited foreign help in the 2020 presidential election, abusing the power of his office and obstructing a congressional inquiry in the process. But the president is almost certain to cast his likely acquittal as a complete exoneration and turn the considerable apparatus of his campaign to stoke public outrage.
Democrats believe the proceeding will put pressure on Republican, particularly those facing tough re-election challenges — to condemn Mr. Trump or risk being cast as an apologist for the president. Yet they, too, risk a backlash if voters sour on the impeachment effort, dismissing it as a political stunt.
(With Agency Inputs ).
