WASHINGTON -- House Democrats moved to draw up formal articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying Thursday that he "leaves us no choice" but to act swiftly because he's likely to corrupt the system again unless removed before next year's election.
A strictly partisan effort at this point, derided immediately by Trump and other leading Republicans as a sham and a hoax, it is seen as a politically risky undertaking. Democrats say it is their duty, while Republicans say will it propel Pelosi's majority out of office.
Congress must act, Pelosi said. "The democracy is what is at stake."
"The president's actions have seriously violated the Constitution," she said. "He is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit. The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections."
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Trump has insisted that he did nothing wrong.
Before the announcement, Trump seemed to welcome the coming fight, calling Democrats "crazy" in a pair of tweets that urged them to get the process over with quickly so he could defend himself in the Republican-controlled Senate.
"If you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business," he wrote.
Afterward, he said Democrats were trying to "Impeach me over NOTHING" and setting a damaging precedent.
"This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents," he tweeted. "That is not what our Founders had in mind."
At the core of the impeachment investigation is a July phone call with the president of Ukraine, in which Trump pressed the Ukraine leader to investigate Democrats, including political rival Joe Biden, at the same time the White House was withholding military aid from the country.
Pelosi delivered her announcement Thursday morning at the Capitol, drawing on the Constitution and the Founding Fathers in claiming Congress' oversight of the president in the nation's system of checks and balances.
"Sadly, but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders and a heart full of love for America, today I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment," Pelosi said.
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Approval of articles of impeachment is considered likely in the Democratic-majority House. Conviction in a trial in the Republican-dominated Senate seems unlikely.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Pelosi "made it clear in a speech that the House is going to plow ahead with this partisan impeachment process on an arbitrary timeline that is driven entirely by the unpopularity of her actions and the Democrats' presidential calendar. I think it's regrettable."
He predicted that the number of Democratic no votes on impeachment will surpass the number of Republican yes votes.
Cotton said it appears that the House will vote to impeach Trump later this month, triggering a Senate trial early next year.
"They've been going at breakneck speed, again, because they know that most Americans don't believe that a president should be impeached on a partisan basis," he said.
This is only the fourth time in U.S. history that Congress has drafted articles of impeachment to try to remove a president.
HATE OR CONSTITUTION?
Once reluctant to pursue impeachment, warning that it would be too divisive for the country and needed to be bipartisan, Pelosi is now leading Congress into politically riskier waters for all sides just ahead of the election year.
During her news conference, Pelosi framed the case against Trump as much broader than an isolated pressure campaign on Ukraine. She described an "aha moment" when she and other Democrats came to the conclusion that Trump's treatment of Ukraine was part of a larger pattern of deference toward Russia, a leading U.S. adversary.
"This isn't about Ukraine. This is about Russia, who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance," Pelosi said. "So sometimes people say, 'Well, I don't know about Ukraine. I don't know that much about Ukraine.' Well, our adversary is Russia. All roads lead to Putin. Understand that."
When asked as she was leaving if she hates Trump, Pelosi stiffened, returned to the lectern and responded sharply that the president's views and politics are for the voters to judge at elections but impeachment "is about the Constitution."
She then said she was offended by the suggestion that she hates anyone.
"As a Catholic, I resent your using the word 'hate' in a sentence that addresses me," she said. "I don't hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love, and [I] always pray for the president, and I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time. So, don't mess with me when it comes to words like that."
Minutes after Pelosi's news conference concluded, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent out a tweet in which he declared, "Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats are clearly are [sic] blinded by their hate for the President."
Later Thursday morning, at his weekly news conference, McCarthy said he takes Pelosi "at her word" that she doesn't hate Trump, but "if she paused for a moment, if she looked at just the facts, she would not have made that determination" about impeachment.
Pressed again on whether he believes Pelosi "hates" Trump, though, McCarthy appeared to backtrack.
"I think I have a hard time believing her," he said.
The president, meanwhile, responded to Pelosi's comments by claiming in a tweet that the speaker just had "a nervous fit."
"She hates that we will soon have 182 great new judges and sooo much more. Stock Market and employment records. She says she 'prays for the President.' I don't believe her, not even close. Help the homeless in your district Nancy. USMCA?" Trump tweeted, referring to the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade.
NUMBER OF ARTICLES
Trump's allies argue that voters, not lawmakers, should decide the president's future. But Democrats say the nation cannot wait for the 2020 election, alleging Trump's past efforts to have foreign countries intervene in the presidential campaign is forcing them to act to prevent him from doing it again. Pelosi said the still-anonymous whistleblower's complaint about Trump's Ukraine phone call changed the dynamic, creating the urgency to act.
The number of articles and the allegations they will include will be a legal and political exercise for the House committee chairmen, who will be meeting privately. They must balance electoral dynamics while striving to hit the Constitution's bar of "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
Pulling from the House's 300-page investigation of the Ukraine matter, Democrats are focusing on at least three areas -- abuse of power, bribery and obstruction -- that could result in two to five articles, they say.
They argue that Trump abused the power of his office by putting personal political gain over national-security interests, engaging in bribery by holding up $400 million in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine, and then obstructing Congress by stonewalling the investigation.
Some liberal Democrats want to reach further into Trump's actions, particularly regarding the findings from special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. That could produce an additional article of obstruction not only of Congress, but also of justice.
But more centrist and moderate Democrats prefer to stick with the Ukraine matter as a simpler narrative that Americans can more easily understand.
McCarthy said Pelosi is more concerned about tearing the president down than building the country up. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., criticized Democrats for focusing on impeachment over other issues. "It's all impeachment, all the time," he said.
At the White House, press secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that Pelosi and the Democrats "should be ashamed."
House members are preparing to vote on the articles of impeachment in the Judiciary Committee, possibly as soon as next week. The committee set a Monday hearing to receive the Intelligence Committee's report outlining the findings against the president.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Daly, Zeke Miller, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Colleen Long, Eric Tucker and Padmananda Rama of The Associated Press; by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; by Felicia Sonmez of The Washington Post; and by Frank E. Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 12/06/2019