The house of representatives released today a resolution “Impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States”. The full resolution can be found here.
Congress settled on two articles of impeachment; Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress. The former, stems 100% from the request by Trump, asking the Ukrainian government “for a favor”. Most of the hearings regarding impeachment, both in the intelligence committee and the judiciary committee, revolved around this impeachable offence.
The second article of impeachment is about Trump’s direction to members, officials and offices of the executive branch to not cooperate with requests and subpoenas by congress. When the intelligence committee hearings began, Trump and his defense team issued a now-infamous letter to congress stating their requests were “invalid“, came as a result of a some sort of vendetta for the 2016 election, and had no basis for such inquiry in the first place given there had been no wrongdoing in his call with the Ukrainian President.
All three contentions, of course, hanged on the idea that Congress’s requests were invalid to begin with; but this is false. As stated multiple times during the hearings, Congress does indeed have the sole power of impeachment. As such, whether the President thinks the inquiry is valid or invalid, it must comply, not complying is as it turns out, an impeachable offense.
These two articles of impeachment will be placed to a vote in the house. As I have said many times before, this Congress has the votes to impeach Trump. Therefore, there is very little chance Trump will not be only the 3rd President in the history of the United States to be impeached.
The next step will be to send the matter to the Senate. It is here, were the likelihood of Trump being removed from office is inverse to that of his impeachment. It will be an uphill battle for Democrats to: 1) agree on mutually-beneficial procedures for the trial in the Senate with the majority-control Republicans, and 2) persuade said Republicans to join them in finding the President guilty of the articles of impeachment and having him removed from office.
As you read this, remember this day, December 10, 2019, as the day when you first heard (or second time if you lived through Clinton’s impeachment), that a US President would be impeached.
