WASHINGTON -- The House Judiciary Committee pushed Thursday toward a historic vote to approve articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, split sharply along party lines.
The committee delayed voting on the articles until this morning. Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., scheduled the panel to return at 9 a.m. CST.
The session is expected to end with charges being sent to the full House for action next week, before the holidays.
The committee on Thursday clashed for hours in pointed and at times emotional debate, drawing on history and the Constitution to argue over the two charges. Trump is accused, in the first article, of abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate his 2020 rival, Joe Biden, while holding military aid as leverage, and, in the second, of obstructing Congress by blocking the House's efforts to scrutinize his actions.
Trump is only the fourth U.S. president to face impeachment proceedings and the first to be running for reelection at the same time. He insists he did nothing wrong and blasts the Democrats' effort daily as a sham and harmful to America. Republican allies seem unwavering in their opposition to expelling Trump, and he claims to be looking ahead to swift acquittal in a Senate trial.
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi sounded confident Thursday that Democrats, who once tried to avoid a solely partisan effort, will have the votes to impeach the president without Republican support when the full House votes next week. But she said it was up to individual lawmakers to weigh the evidence.
"This is a vote that people are going to have to come to their own conclusions on," she said at a weekly news conference. "People will vote the way they vote."
Two Democrats opposed an Oct. 31 resolution setting rules for the impeachment inquiry: Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. Democratic aides believe a handful more may follow on the actual impeachment vote but nowhere near enough to imperil passage of the two articles.
The outcome poses potentially serious political consequences for both parties ahead of the 2020 elections, with Americans deeply divided over whether the president carried out impeachable acts and if it should be up to Congress, or the voters, to decide whether he should remain in office.
Democrats note that the investigations go back to special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House. And they say his dealings with Ukraine have benefited its aggressive neighbor Russia, not the U.S., and he must be prevented from "corrupting" U.S. elections again and cheating his way to a second term next year.
The president on Thursday once again declared his innocence. He turned to Twitter to retweet dozens of allies who were defending his conduct and slamming the Democrats.
Trump made clear he was watching the proceedings, accusing two representatives of misquoting from a July phone call he had with Ukraine's president in which Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to "do us a favor though" with regard to the investigations.
Trump never mounted a defense in the House, declining repeated invitations from Democrats to take part in the process. He would be given a fairer chance in the Senate, the president and his team concluded.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said a trial would begin in his chamber in early January. He met Thursday with Eric Ueland, Trump's legislative affairs director.
The White House will be "cooperative and very collaborative" as the Senate moves to a trial, Ueland said after leaving McConnell's office.
"We're having good close communication and conversation with Senate Republicans in the event the house goes ahead and actually produces articles of impeachment," Ueland said. "We're going to continue to work closely with Senate Republicans as well as other members of Congress on the questions and we'll continue to be very cooperative and very collaborative with our friends up here on the Hill as we work through this process."
Ueland, who visited Capitol Hill with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, wouldn't respond to specific questions about process or whether the White House would want Senate Republicans to call witnesses.
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CALLING ON HISTORY
The Judiciary Committee session has drawn out over two days, with both sides appealing to Americans' sense of history -- Democrats describing a sense of duty to stop what one called the president's "constitutional crime spree" and Republicans decrying what one said was the "hot garbage" impeachment and what it means for the future of the country.
As lawmakers dug in for the second day at the stately hearing room in the Capitol, Nadler immediately asked for a full reading of the two articles of impeachment against the president as TV cameras carried the live proceedings. Then came a long day of fights over amendments, primarily by Republicans trying to stop the impeachment. They were being rejected by Democrats along party lines.
"The central issue of this impeachment is the corruption of our institutions that safeguard democracy by our president," Nadler said. "We cannot tolerate a president subverting the fairness and integrity of our elections."
The top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, called the proceedings a "farce" and said they should be halted until his side was provided a chance for its own hearing. The request was denied, with the chairman saying the process was in line with the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
First up was an amendment from GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who tried to delete the first charge against Trump. "This amendment strikes article one because article one ignores the truth," he declared.
Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., argued there was "overwhelming evidence" that the president with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in pushing Ukraine to investigate rival Biden, was engaged in an abuse of power "to corrupt American elections."
Debate on that one amendment lasted for hours before it was defeated, 23-17, on a party-line vote.
Another amendment, from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., sought to replace part of the article that says Trump "corruptly solicited" Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden with his reference to Biden's son Hunter Biden and the gas company in Ukraine where he served on the board. That, too, was rejected by the panel on party lines. Others followed.
Nearly every lawmaker on the 41-member panel took the opportunity to speak, using motions to "strike the last word" to gain recognition from the chairman.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., took a direct shot at Trump, whom he said "attacks everybody who won't bend the knee." Jeffries said his Republican colleagues appeared more focused on attacking the Bidens rather than discussing the allegations against Trump. He implored them to stay on task.
Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., argued that impeaching Trump for obstruction of Congress doesn't make sense because Republican lawmakers were "sent here to obstruct this Congress." While praising Trump's policies, he also chastised the deal Democrats made with the White House to provide all federal employees paid family leave for three months.
Republicans argued that Democrats were merely impeaching the president because they abhorred his unorthodox style and his conservative policies, citing years' worth of strident cries from the most liberal members of their party championing Trump's removal.
"This impeachment is going to fail," said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La. "The Democrats are going to pay a heavy political price for it, but the Pandora's box they have opened today will do irreparable injury to our country in years ahead."
Democrats accused Republicans of turning a blind eye to misconduct by Trump out of reflexive loyalty to their party.
"This is about conscience, the conscience of the nation, the conscience of my friends on the other side of the aisle," said Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga. "Do you believe that we should allow this to go unaddressed, what the president did? Because we are a country of precedent; we are a country of rule of law; we are a country of norms and traditions."
Information for this article was contributed by Mary Clare Jalonick, Lisa Mascaro, Laurie Kellman, Alan Fram, Padmananda Rama and David Eggert of The Associated Press; by John Wagner, Colby Itkowitz, Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis, Karoun Demirjian, Seung Min Kim and Elise Viebeck of The Washington Post; by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; and by BIlly House of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 12/13/2019